


Clandestine

by AnAuthorGoingByMeadow



Category: Persona 5
Genre: Alcohol, Dorks in Love, Drug Use, Eating Disorders, F/F, F/M, Flirting, Gender Dysphoria, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Multi, Original Palaces, Original Villains, Other Ships Not Mentioned in Tags, Polyamory, Trans Character, Trans Female Character, Trans Male Character, Xanatos Speed Chess, but things turn out alright in the end, coming out is hard, eventual gamer-girl kawakami, hifumi togo is a total badass, its nothing but IQ 9000 plays up in here, transfem haru, transfem hifumi, transmasc ren
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-21
Updated: 2020-09-03
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:41:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 27,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26024368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnAuthorGoingByMeadow/pseuds/AnAuthorGoingByMeadow
Summary: Ren Amamiya is running multiple teams of Phantom Thieves in secret; he has to juggle his leadership over them while simultaneously preventing them from discovering each other’s identities. Easier said than done when his teams include the likes of fortune tellers, aspiring journalists, and hackers.This is a ‘Confidants are Shujin Students’ AU where Ren runs three teams of Phantom Thieves made up of his various confidants, hiding them from each other for their own safety.There will be LGBTQ+ themes and content, transgender characters, and Royal spoilers.
Relationships: Amamiya Ren/Togo Hifumi/Okumura Haru, Ohya Ichiko/Takemi Tae, Suzui Shiho/Takamaki Ann
Comments: 16
Kudos: 23





	1. Ren

**Author's Note:**

> Royal spoilers ahead. This is your final warning.
> 
> This story is a mixed bag of AU elements. Every Confidant except Igor, Morgana, Sojiro, and Sae is now a teenage Shujin student. This means young Confidants have been aged-up, older Confidants have been aged-down, and the non-Shujin teens are now enrolled in Shujin.
> 
> For plot reasons, Maruki can’t appear, and his impact on Sumire’s story has been nullified. I really tried to work him in, but it just didn’t fit the outline and plot I made. I may make a side-series including him as a regular Confidant, if it’s requested. I'm sorry!
> 
> Some relationships went untagged because having them in the tags might've attracted an audience expecting age-gaps, or repulse people who might otherwise enjoy the story. Those untagged ships are expected to be 'Mishima/Yoshida' and 'Futaba/Shinya/Kawakami'. All characters involved in them are teenagers here.

Ren gazed out the train window, watching the city pass by. The message on the intercom said that his station was up next. Where he was just barely managing to fight off the urge to sleep before, he found himself snapped straight to wakefulness with the good news.

Once at the station, he transferred to his next line, and from there made his way to the streets of Yongen-Jaya, a residential area with a sort-of rustic charm that showed signs of _life_ , not city-bustle. After getting lost and asking for directions no less than three times in the winding alleys of shops, houses, and dinky apartments, he made his way to a quaint little store called Café Leblanc.

He took care to note that the ‘b’ was lowercase on the sign. The online map had misprinted it with a capital ‘B’.

When he opened the doors, he was met with a rich aroma with a thousand notes and a rough introduction from the shop owner. His new caretaker-for-the-year — Sojiro Sakura, an older man with a goatee sculpted by hair-products — managed to carve out a place for himself on the ‘hardest of hardasses’ scale before abandoning him to a garbage dump of a room in the attic of the café. It was dusty, musty, and cluttered. At least all the spiders would deal with the flies, he mused.

It took the whole rest of the day to clean it up, only for Sojiro to come upstairs and immediately send him off to bed, because the shop would be locked up at night. It was his first day in a new city, and he didn’t even get a chance to go out and explore.

As he drifted to sleep, he heard the faint sound of piano music getting closer.

“Welcome to the Velvet Room,” someone said. He sprung upright as the sudden presence shocked him awake. He found himself in a padded prison cell. “Oh, my apologies for startling you. It’s been some time since I’ve welcomed such a heavy sleeper.”

Ren shook his head, tossing his legs off the side of the slab that passed for a bed. “What is this?”

“This is a place between dream and reality, mind and matter,” the voice explained. Ren rubbed the sleep from his eyes as it spoke to him. “Only those bound by a contract — or soon to be bound by a contract — may enter it.”

It was just a dream, then. He could handle a weird dream.

Ren looked up to the man, and instead found an inhuman _thing_ staring back at him. The man sat at a writing desk, and had a giant nose, skin that shone like lacquered wood under the harsh lights, and an improperly proportioned body, but what he couldn’t tear his gaze away from was the man’s eyes. They were beady, bloodshot, and laser-focused on him.

“Oh, my apologies for not introducing myself. I am Igor. And you are...?”

“Ren Amamiya,” he answered mechanically.

“Ren, then. You did well in selecting that name, it’s very fitting for what you will be doing soon.” With a flourish of his hand, a set of cards magically appeared on the table before him. Ren was taken somewhat aback by the flagrant display of strange powers. “Knowledge can be divined from cards as easily as from a name, if you’d believe it. Would you like a demonstration of this?”

“You know what?” Ren said. “You just summoned a deck of cards right in front of you, I’ll believe just about whatever you say.” Feeling a bit guilty at snarking at this man, who had been nothing but kind despite his strange demeanor, Ren added, ”Can you use that trick to cheat at poker?”

Igor chuckled. “When I play games, I try to play fairly, and that entails not utilizing the power and information available to me when doing so is unjustified. In any case, let us begin. In this reading, we will view three cards: Past, present, and future.”

Ren gave him a nod, just to seem attentive.

“The first card will represent your past: the Wheel of Fortune, reversed. You may have encountered a spell of bad luck, and possibly failed to change something.”

He was talking about the drunk man, Ren just knew it. The thought of that man — his lies, his attempted abduction of that woman — it all made his blood boil. It hadn’t been right.

“The next card shall be your present,” Igor continued, flipping the next card. “Ah, the Hanged Man in the upright position. It represents being trapped, but also... new perspectives.”

This would be the arrest, the lawsuit, and his probation. The courts went so far as to order him to move to Tokyo for a year, all because he tried to save a woman and ‘injured’ a man in the process. His family said the city would be good for him.

“Lastly, your future is represented by the reversed Hierophant,” Igor seemed pleased to see this. “It represents personal conviction and a challenge to the status quo. Should there ever be a card better suited to a Trickster than the Fool, this would be it.”

Ren frowned at that. His probation officer wouldn’t be happy to hear that particular news.

This was beginning to feel like more than just a dream.

“I’m afraid that this is all we have time for tonight,” Igor concluded. “I’ll see you again soon.”

* * *

The next morning, Sojiro drove him to Shujin Academy. He went straight to the principal’s office for the meeting regarding his transfer.

“Your acceptance to our school is not one that should be taken lightly,” the principal — a rotund man with a shiny bald head — warned. “Shujin holds a prestigious reputation, allowing us great liberties in attempting to reform students such as yourself. Any failure to take part in this reformation will be your responsibility. Remember, we will not hesitate to expel you if you cause trouble. We have nothing to lose by doing so. We’ve done it before.”

Ren kept his head down. His description didn’t sound like a school that went out of its way to reform students, but instead a school that had a system in place to squeeze every last drop of reputation out of them. He had seen the front entrance, lined with athletics trophies and awards, and the hallways covered with student-made art. He would be their _project_ ; somebody they could flaunt as a success story if he made it out of the school year, or sweep their involvement under the rug should he fail.

“Well?” Sojiro asked. “What do you have to say?”

“I won’t cause any trouble,” Ren said. “I’ll do what I can to keep this school’s good name.”

“Good,” the principal said, smiling. “I’m glad we’ve reached an understanding. I’ve arranged for you to have a tutoring session every Saturday, in the library. So long as you behave and go to these sessions, your... other circumstances shouldn’t cause any issues.”

His heart felt like it skipped a beat when he ground out the words ‘other circumstances’. They knew.

Sojiro raised an eyebrow. “What’s he talking about?”

“Thank you,” Ren said, in lieu of an explanation for Sojiro. He wasn’t surprised that his parents left Sojiro in the dark about it. They didn’t really like to talk about it, and getting a stranger to take him in would only be harder if they opened their mouths.

“Don’t thank me,” the principal said. “Certain high-profile parties have a vested interest in ensuring this school is comfortable for students dealing with afflictions such as your own. I don’t intend to give them any reason to think this school isn’t suitable for them. You will not be denied amenities so long as it pleases them.”

Ren nodded, hoping to appease the man. Even with these ‘amenities’, he would have to keep his head down. Sojiro only looked more confused, giving Ren a look demanding an explanation when this was all over.

The principal went over a few more things with them, wrapping up the meeting with far fewer threats and far more boring bureaucracy. Ren was given his student ID and told about the schedule for those tutoring sessions. On their way out, Sojiro asked, “What was that about?”

Ren was all too familiar with this weakness wracking his body, one that came to him when he was out of control of having to tell the truth and not knowing what would happen in the aftermath of his confession. Sojiro could turn on him, or kick him out, or try to force him to give it up. If there were positive outcomes, they weren’t on Ren’s mind. He clenched his jaw and spoke. “I was born a girl.”

Sojiro’s brow fell from curious to bored disappointment. “What, that’s it? I thought you had committed a second crime you were keeping secret or something. So what, you have some sort of surgery or something?”

“What? No, not yet,” he admitted. He was tempted to say something along the lines of ‘adding is harder than taking away’, but Sojiro didn’t need to hear _that_ factoid. “It feels like I’ve got a man’s soul, and that’s what’s important. Just treat me like a man who needs more privacy with his body. And... don’t tell anyone.”

“I can handle that, I guess,” Sojiro said. “Not like it’s any of my business anyway.”

Ren was reconsidering his stance on Sojiro being a hardass. Well, no, Sojiro was objectively still a hardass. But Ren would give credit where credit was due; he’d take a million Sojiro’s over what he had dealt with back home.

More pressingly, the principal had said something that caught Ren’s attention. He had all but admitted — with veiled disapproval, admittedly — that there were others in the school like Ren. Other transgender students.

Traffic stalled, and while they waited, Ren boredly poked through his phone. He noticed an unfamiliar blue icon of a stylized eye, that seemed to not only be animated, but also animated his background with a ripple, like a stone sitting in a pond. With some trepidation, he opened the app, and was greeted with a small text pop-up.

_‘This is the Metaverse Navigator. I have gifted it to you to aid you in your journey. Make good use of it. Your friend, Igor.’_

Something caught in Ren’s throat. That was the name of the strange man from his dream, wasn’t it? He just went through the stress of coming out to a near-stranger that had previously threatened to kick him out, and now his dreams were bleeding into reality to boot?

He shut his phone off. It wasn’t worth worrying about. Or, at least he’d try to not worry about it, because he was fairly certain that otherwise the stress would kill him and then the aerosolized stress-hormones emitted from his corpse would cause a mass-hysteria incident.

“Ugh, another accident?” Sojiro said. Ren was brought back to reality, where he heard the radio rambling on about a subway derailment. “There’s been a lot of those lately. In fact, there was a real sad one just last month...”

When they arrived at the café, they spoke briefly again, and Ren went up to his room. He checked out the ‘Metaverse Navigator’ again. After a few minutes of hopelessly fiddling with the app, he gave up and went to bed.

* * *

His first day of school was going better than expected.

Aside from the imprisonment in an otherworldly castle, the near-death experience in a high-school monarch’s sex-torture dungeon, realizing his whole life had been spent under the soul-crushing weight of societal expectation, his rejection of that soul-crushing weight, his subsequent summoning of a demonic and gentlemanly thief-figure with knives for heels, and the unexpected companionship of a talking quasi-cat, the day was shaping up to be pretty typical. Positive and productive, even.

With a kick, Ren caved-in a shadow’s head and sent a splatter of pumpkin all over the floor.

“Nice one!” Morgana said. “That’s the last of them, let’s keep moving!”

“Hold it!” Ryuji said. Ren was fairly certain his name was Ryuji, but everything was happening very fast. “What about the guys in these cells?”

“They’re not real humans,” Morgana explained. “This castle is a world of Kamoshida’s desires, so the people here are only what Kamoshida desires them to be.”

“So it’s just what he wishes were true, right?” Ryuji asked, tapping his foot against the wet cobblestones.

Morgana sighed. “Yes, I’ve only explained this three times already! Is he always this slow?”

Ren shrugged. “I only just met him, so I’ll be generous and say his nerves are shot because of the situation.”

“In any case, these people aren’t real, so ignore them.”

“This is obviously still really fu— uh, effed up!”

Morgana, clearly tired of this discussion, summoned the towering figure of Zorro behind him. The persona slashed at the air with his sword, carving a blade of wind that slipped through the bars of a cell and bisected one of the prisoners. Ryuji swore to himself and ran up to the bars, but it was too late, the student was beyond dead, melting into black goop.

“Think of these as being like Kamoshida’s imaginary friends, if that helps,” Morgana explained. “No matter what we do, save them or kill them, he’ll be able to ‘imagine’ them right back to how they were before and undo it. They’re _props_.”

Morgana looked into a different cell. The student in there scrambled back avoiding eye-contact, his spirit long broken. “Still, this proves that he sees them as slaves,” Morgana said. “He might even treat them that way in reality.”

Ryuji muttered under his breath, “Sounds like something that asshole would do.”

“I hope for your sake that you’re not talking about me,” rang a hollow, twisted voice. Ren winced as he heard a clatter of footsteps approach them from behind.

King Kamoshida stepped onto the drawbridge behind them, followed by a small group of guards, one in golden armor. “You probably thought you were clever with that trick, huh? Did you think that none of my guards would have something as simple as spare keys?”

“You provoked him!? This is bad,” said Morgana.

“Guards, kill them!”

The guards all stepped forward, exploding into red and black tar. From their combined puddle emerged an immense knight on horseback, flanked by smaller horses with demonic horns.

Before Ren could react, he was knocked flat by a horse and pinned to the ground by its hoof. Morgana lasted only a moment longer, avoiding the weaker shadows, only to be struck by the knight’s sword and pinned down while trying to use Zorro’s magic to close the cut from the sword.

“What’s with that look on your face, Sakamoto?” Kamoshida asked, his face curled into a horrible grin. “Upset that what’s been coming to you finally caught up? You should be grateful, after all that I did for you and that worthless track team.”

“You bastard,” Ryuji bit out. “You knew what you were doing to us! It was physical abuse!”

Ren tried to climb to his feet, but one of the horses stamped down on his back and drove him into the ground.

“It was just some tough training, and well deserved,” said Kamoshida, ignoring Ren’s struggle. “If your old coach hadn’t expected my team to play second-fiddle to his, we might’ve resolved this more peacefully. Good thing he got fired, huh? It might’ve escalated past your leg and track scholarship, otherwise.”

“You...” Ryuji started. He stalled as Kamoshida stepped up to him.

Kamoshida punched him to the ground.

“Is this it?” Ryuji asked himself. “Am I supposed to lose to him again?”

“Don’t let him win,” Ren said through gritted teeth. “You don’t have to take it.”

Ryuji nodded.

He tried to climb back to his feet, only to be kicked down by Kamoshida. “Stay down, you fucking parasite. All you do is cling to my school and the reputation I give it as though you’d ever get somewhere in life. Even if you graduate, nothing you accomplish will be worth aspiring towards, you know. It’ll all be freebies and handouts.”

Ryuji still tried to pick himself up, his body shaking, but Kamoshida stomped on his hand. “Stop looking down on me,” Ryuji said.

Kamoshida kicked him in the face, leaving him sprawled across the floor.

“Listen to me,” Ryuji spat out some blood. Under the golden glow from his eyes, Ren could see his lip was split open. “Stop looking down on me.”

Instead of saying anything, Kamoshida lifted him up by the collar of his shirt. He whispered something to Ryuji that Ren couldn’t hear.

“I said...” Ryuji bit out, his voice steadily raising. “Stop lookin’ down on me with that _stupid smile on your face!_ ”

There was a flash of blue light, and Kamoshida stumbled back, dropping him. Ryuji landed on his feet, revealing his face a gray, skull-shaped mask when he looked back at Kamoshida.

Ren grinned. He remembered his own awakening in that cell. When his mask appeared, he realized that it had, in some abstract sense, been there all along. He had hidden himself away, accepting the darkness surrounding him in life because he was afraid of standing against it. That fear embodied itself in the mask, and the realization that it had always controlled him was worse than death, worse than hell.

Just accepting that the mask was there was the hardest part, but when he acknowledged it, it appeared on his face in a flicker of heatless blue flame, just as it had here for Ryuji.

He watched Ryuji grip at his mask, screaming as he tore it off his face in a spray of blood. He knew the feeling. The mask had protected him, in some sense. It _hurt_ to reject that passive part of himself; to rip that safety and stability away, knowing that from that point forward everything in his life would be a bit more uncertain.

There was something else that felt really good about it, though.

When Ren awakened, it came with this awareness of how much his life had been dictated by that passivity and acceptance. He had accepted that society had a path for him, and that the cost of following that path was somehow better for him than the consequences of rejecting it.

That mask had haunted him his whole life. Acknowledging it was the most difficult thing he had ever done. Feeling it sit on his face unaddressed was twenty times worse — a monstrous elephant in the room, a gut-wrenching horror and disgust at himself. None of it was physical, it was a body-wracking rush of his most regretted act, and he knew it could never be bottled down now that he had felt it.

By comparison, ripping it off had been like ripping off a bandage.

A tug of pain, and then catharsis. Confidence, even.

There was blood splattered at Ryuji’s feet. He was now wearing a black leather jacket dotted with metal plates and a loose red tie. Behind him was a towering skeletal figure riding a tiny pirate’s ship. “Wassup, persona?” he said, grinning. “This effin’ rocks!”

That grin of his said it all.

He fired a blast of electricity at the shadows, and the bolt skipped and bounded around, always knocking them down before being redirected to the next enemy. When the shadow pinning Ren was hit, it lost its balance, allowing him to push it aside and slash its throat with his knife.

“How dare you trifle King Kamoshida?” the largest shadow asked. Morgana jumped onto the knight and stabbed it through an eyehole. The horse it was riding buckled, and the three of them laid into it with everything they had.

It began decomposing into a pudding, moaning all the while. “You may have bested me,” it managed through. “But Kamoshida is—”

It deteriorated into a pile of runny tar.

“Run!” Morgana yelled, already making headway down the hall. “Ignore Kamoshida! We have to get out of here!”

Ren and Ryuji followed Morgana, who led them out of the dungeons and through the main hall of the castle. He led them to a room with a vent just wide enough to crawl through.

“Thanks,” Ryuji panted, leaning into Ren for support. Apparently this whole thing had done a number on him. “Are you coming with us, cat?”

“I am _not_ a cat, I’m an egregore of humanity’s hopes!” Morgana said, somewhat bitterly. Ren had no idea what an ‘egregore’ was. “And... I would normally say ‘no’, but you two just sent the security level through the roof. The shadows will be searching everywhere, so I’ll join you in reality until it cools off. Don’t make fun of me when we get there, alright?”

They left together, and the world spun back into normality as they distanced themselves from the castle. They were now on the city streets, with their outfits having reverted back to normal. Morgana was no longer a strange catlike monster, but instead a regular house cat by Ren’s foot. Ren noted that the rain from earlier had stopped, meaning that time had passed while they were in that other world.

Naturally, that would mean that they were late for school now.

“There’s policemen over there,” Ren said, noticing a pair of officers further down the sidewalk. “Avoid them or we’ll get in trouble for skipping class.”

Ryuji and Morgana followed him into the alleyway they had initially traveled through to find the castle.

“I’m so exhausted,” Ryuji complained.

“You’re lucky to even be alive,” countered Morgana.

“Wait, did you just talk? You’re like a talking cat?”

“You went through all _that_ , and that’s the question you’re asking? And didn’t I tell you to not make fun of me?”

“Alright, fine,” Ryuji said, bouncing his leg anxiously, and checking his phone. “We’re so dead. We missed over half the day.”

“Give me your number,” Ren said. “I’ll message you after school. We need to hurry or we’ll be even later.”

“And what about me?” asked Morgana. “Should I wait outside?”

“Do that. We’ll meet you after classes are over. You have a lot of explaining to do.”

Morgana nodded.

* * *

When Ren finally made it to class, he was still fighting off the exhaustion of everything that happened. He mechanically went along with the teacher — a woman named Ms. Usami — introducing himself to the class while she scolded him for being late in front of everyone. The students were in a tizzy over him and his criminal record, which they _somehow_ knew about. He shuffled down the aisle to the only open seat, passing a blonde girl that he had seen earlier before the castle happened.

Lectures were short and sweet, stuff he decided he could catch up on by reading through his textbook after class. When the day came to a close, he felt a tap on his shoulder.

He turned to the seat behind him, to see another blonde girl behind him, sporting even more strongly European features than the mixed-race girl in front of him. This other girl had long hair down to her back, eerily golden eyes, and a headband with a butterfly on it. “Welcome, Trickster,” she whispered. “I’m glad to see you made it here safely.”

“Trickster?” he repeated. Somehow, everything just kept getting weirder.


	2. Ren

The strange girl smiled at him. “My name is Lavenza,” she said as she got up to leave. “Don’t mind me, our paths will cross again when the time’s right.”

Ren managed a straight face. “But you sit right behind me. We’ll be seeing each other all the time.”

Her face turned a light shade of pink. “Oh, um. That’s right! Well, I’ll see you tomorrow, in that case.” She departed quickly, and Ren followed her out to see her walking briskly down the hall. He didn’t make an effort to match her pace, she clearly needed time to recover from... whatever that was.

In the halls, Ren could hear the murmurs. “Does he know her?” “She’s a total freak, so it’s not surprising.” “This school’s full of freaks.” “He already looks like he’s about to snap.” “He’s got an assault record, you know.” “Do you think he’s going to take advantage of her?” “Not so loud, he’ll hear you.”

The last one was his personal favorite. It came with some modicum of self-awareness, even if her opinions on proper volume-control were a bit on the hypocritical side.

His phone buzzed. Ryuji had messaged him, inviting him up to the roof. Ren quickly replied back with a reminder that Morgana was waiting for them out front, and started on his way down the stairs instead.

On his way out, he was stopped suddenly by a student — a first-year — with short black hair and an overly-friendly grin. “Hi, Amamiya, right? My name’s Ichiko Ohya, with the school newspaper club. Can I talk to you for a moment?”

“About what?” he asked.

“I was curious about life in the countryside,” she said. “Being a new transfer, I’m sure you have some interesting thoughts about the change to city life.”

Ren sighed. “This is really going to be about the assault case, isn’t it?”

Her fake cheer turns into a stern expression, business-like. “Listen, I can put a pretty coat of ‘small-town boy comes to the city’ spin on an interview to push it through the school press. You’re a hot topic, you do this and everyone reads an article talking about how you’re just a quiet country boy. It might even shut some of them up. Are you in or not?”

“I’m busy right now,” Ren admitted. He couldn’t think of a good reason to realistically turn her down. A school newspaper wouldn’t allow slander, so she couldn’t possibly be tricking him. “But I’ll consider it.”

Ichiko grinned and handed him a slip of paper with her phone number on it. “As long as it’s this week, I’ll be happy,” she said, turning away and giving him a half-assed wave.

The distraction with her was apparently enough for Ryuji to catch up with Ren. “Hey, sorry about that.” He looked at Ichiko, still walking away, then grinned at Ren. “So, that’s your type, huh? And you got her number?”

“It’s not like that. Besides, I also got _your_ number earlier.”

“Oh, uhhh,” he said. “Well, anyways, we’ve got a cat to meet up with. Let’s go.”

They stepped outside, and saw Morgana lounging on one of the pillars on the school gates. “It’s about time you two showed up,” he said, yawning and stretching out.

“Hey! We don’t control when classes end!”

“Your classes let out early! I could see you through the front door window. You should’ve come here right away, not spent time getting girls' phone numbers!”

“Is it okay for you to be talking in public?” Ren asked, changing the subject.

“I think only persona-users can understand me in reality,” Mogana said. “You’re thinking of doing something about Kamoshida, right?”

Ryuji opened his mouth, then reconsidered whatever he was about to say. It seemed he had some filter, even if he made it clear when he was using it. Instead, he said, “What’re you proposing?”

“Obviously you want back at him for mistreating the students he had locked up in his castle, and he said he did something to your leg too. I can help you do it, if you help me with something in exchange.”

“What would we be doing to him?” Ryuji asked. “And what would we be doin’ in exchange?”

“I’d help you take his evil heart, which would force him to feel remorse for his actions,” Morgana said, looking smug even by cat standards. “The other part is more complicated. It’d take time to explain.”

Ryuji’s eyes were locked on to Morgana, clearly considering it. “So like, what, he’d turn good?”

“Probably. He’d apologize, at the very least. And it’s safe, too. We’d only be taking the evil parts.”

“But isn’t that like, brainwashin’ or something?” Ryuji asked. “I dunno if I’m down for that. Especially if you’re just gonna use it to rope us into something.”

Morgana stood and stretched himself out. “Just look into the sort of person Kamoshida _really_ is. A Palace like that doesn’t form for nothing. I’ll be waiting at the castle, meet me there when you’re ready to negotiate our terms.” With that, he jumped down into the school’s courtyard and seemingly vanished behind a light-post.

“Dude,” Ryuji said. “Did you see that? This is so effin’ nuts.”

“I saw it,” said Ren, also in some state of disbelief. “He seems to think that if you looked into Kamoshida, it’d be bad enough for you to go along with his plan.”

“Knowin’ Kamoshida, there’s probably real nasty stuff,” Ryuji said, leaning to one side. “The cat said that Kamoshida might be mistreatin’ the volleyball team, right? Do you think we should start there?”

Ryuji was looking at Ren with expectation, and even a bit of hope. Ren hadn’t agreed to get involved with any of this, but... with Ryuji being the closest thing to a friend he had here, was he really going to just let him flounder and handle this himself?

...and it was all connected to that Igor guy, too. “Let’s start with that, yeah. Meet up tomorrow?”

“You know it,” Ryuji grinned.

* * *

“Go upstairs, we’ll talk when there’s no customers,” Sojiro scolded the second Ren walked through the door.

A pale, punk teen snorted at the exchange from a booth. “So the infamous transfer’s staying with you, Boss?” She said it like she thought it was funny.

“You go to the same school as him, huh?” said Sojiro. Ren had to study her outfit to recognize the Shujin uniform hidden under the heavy punk modifications, but the tartan skirt ultimately gave it away. “If he ever gets into any _more_ trouble, let me know and I’ll treat you to a free cup.”

“I doubt I’ll learn anything you want to hear,” she said. “If I told you half the things they were saying about him, I’d overdose on the caffeine.”

“Oh?” Sojiro said, one eyebrow raised. He didn’t look happy as he shooed Ren up the stairs.

“It’s all rumors,” she said. Ren stopped halfway up the steps to listen in on them. “Shujin’s a school for social climbers. The students only care about looking good and getting ahead. If there were any good ones, they did what they could to fit in or keep their heads down, and now the superficial gossips run the school.”

That was an incredibly eloquent way of expressing disdain for the preps. Still, she didn’t seem to be wrong, per se. Word traveled fast in his old hometown, but Shujin seemed to take his presence almost personally.

Ren thought back to that blonde girl that sat behind him, Lavenza. People were whispering about her too, weren’t they? But even he could admit that something seemed _off_ about her. It didn’t mean she deserved the negative attention.

“Sounds like you have some strong opinions on the place,” Sojiro said.

“I do,” she said. “They had strong opinions on me first, though.” Ren heard her taking steps towards the door. “I’ll be going, have fun chewing him out; payment’s on the table.”

“Come on down,” Sojiro ordered when the door jingled shut.

Ren came back to the main room of the café, seeing Sojiro standing behind the counter.

“Sounds like there’s some rumors about you at school,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“Well, don’t let that follow you here, got it? I don’t need to get caught up in that crap. Just keep your head down, and don’t do something stupid again. No more being late, and don’t give me lip about it either.”

“Understood,” Ren muttered through a clenched jaw.

“Anyways, head up to your room. I expect you to actually go to school tomorrow.”

* * *

As he climbed off the train to Shibuya, Ren saw that punkish girl from Leblanc getting off the train with him. She had her head lowered and earbuds in, but when she noticed Ren walking in the same direction as her, she took them out. “Amamiya, right?”

“Yeah,” he said. He hadn’t expected her to strike up a conversation, and wasn’t sure what he would say.

“Takemi,” she introduced herself. “Second-year.”

Ren nodded, noting the ‘2’ on her collar. “You seem like you know some things about Shujin, from what you were going on about last night.”

“Yeah, I knew you would’ve heard that. You’re friends with Sakamoto, right?” she asked. “He probably knows more than I do about the way things work there. I’ve kept my head down.”

“I know that something happened to his leg,” Ren said. Despite her hesitance, this seemed like a good opportunity to start asking questions. “And that he’s got beef with Kamoshida.”

She nodded. “Supposedly, he attacked Kamoshida during track practice and Kamoshida broke his leg in self-defense. Between that and the old coach getting fired, the whole team was shut down.”

“I don’t buy that story,” Ren said as they stepped out of the station and began towards the other line.

Takemi gave him a look. “They performed at a national level, so nobody with a brain does. But that doesn’t mean much. Ohya sure didn’t believe it, and that didn’t do her any favors.”

“Ohya?” Ren asked. The name sounded familiar.

“Ichiko Ohya. She joined the newspaper club during her first week — so before you transferred in — and immediately started digging into the volleyball team. I don’t know the details, but the whole school knows her as a liar and drama-queen now. Hypocritical.”

The two shuffled into the crowd waiting for the train, and Ren yawned. “So what do they say about you? I’ll make sure to not believe it when I hear it.”

Takemi shot him a glare. “What is it that you hope to get out of me telling you that? You just said that you’ll hear it from them.”

“I hope I’ll get the real story,” he said, easily.

The train pulled into the station.

“I spent most of elementary and middle school sick,” Takemi said, sighing. “My doctors were my heroes, I wanted to be just like them... _want_ to be just like them. So I started dabbling in herbal remedies, and then my own recipes.”

“Your own recipes?” Ren asked as they climbed on, getting pushed around by the cramped crowd.

“Off-the-shelf drugs mixed together with herbal extracts, vitamins, and whatever else I could get my hands on legally.”

Ren blinked. This was exactly the sort of thing that maxed-out the ‘horrifying’ and ‘impressive’ gauges on hobbies for teenagers.

“I don’t deal illegal drugs, by the way,” Takemi said. “That’s what the rumors say I do. Almost everyone who approaches me approaches me for that.”

“Do you deal _legal_ drugs?” he asked.

“I have energy candies in my bag. Four hundred yen for a single piece. Just one’s stronger than a store bought energy drink.”

“How’d you manage that?”

“Trade secret,” she said.

“Placebo effect, got it.”

She chuckled, to Ren’s surprise. “That doesn’t work, everybody’s already used to energy drinks that actually do something. They know the difference. It’s crushed-up caffeine pills, plus some extra stuff. I buy it all online. They _do_ work, but I may exaggerate my claims somewhat.”

“I’d try one normally,” Ren said. “Too bad I already had coffee this morning.”

“Oh, right, you live with Boss. I’m a little jealous, honestly,” she yawned. “Just thinking about coffee is making me jealous.” She reached into her bag, pulled out a tiny bag full of tiny hard candies. She popped one in her mouth and crunched down on it, before wincing. “Taste needs work.”

Ren cracked a smile at that, checking his class schedule on his phone. He still had to familiarize himself with his classes. “Ugh, there’s P.E. today.”

“Gross,” Takemi said. “I’m glad my old medical exemption hasn’t expired.”

Ren glanced over at her. “Lucky you. Do you know anywhere I can change in private? I don’t want to be around others.”

“The nurse’s office?” she suggested with a shrug. “Sometimes when I’m volunteering with the Student Health Association, there will be people who go into the special restroom to change. It’s a unisex single-occupancy for disabled students. Pretty much nobody uses it, so you won’t be in anyone’s way.”

“That’s perfect, thanks.”

They made some amount of small talk after that, but conversation petered out quickly. Instead, they made their transfers in silence, not making any particular effort to stay together but by virtue of heading to the same place, never quite drifting apart either.

Ren silently hoped that this could be the start of a friendship that wasn’t based in pervert castles, weird Trickster-powers, or talking cats.

As they entered a crowd in the Shibuya station, Ren heard a fragment of a conversation between two other schoolmates of his. “Is that her, with the red hair? She’s so skinny, it’s not fair. Do you think she does the Sayumi diet?”

He ignored their rambling, only briefly glancing through the crowd to see a short girl with bright red hair standing ahead of them.

Once he arrived at school, he went through the day fairly normally, going through the motions and trying to come to terms with the feeling of Lavenza’s eyes drifting over the back of his head. Eventually, the first scheduled P.E. class was announced, and the room started to clear out. While others filed their way to the Practice Building, Ren made his way straight to the nurse’s office.

“Excuse me,” he said as he stepped inside. “I heard that sometimes students change in the bathroom here.”

The nurse didn’t even look up to him, instead focusing on the file she had to her nails. “Oh, you’re the new one, huh? Well, it’s occupied.”

She said ‘the new one’, and Ren swallowed hard. As he scrutinized her face, he concluded that she didn’t seem to really care beyond dispassionately dismissing him, so he let himself relax.

“Can I wait outside of it?”

She shrugged. “Whatever.”

Ren walked up to the door and stood at it. He could hear a muffled voice on the other side, one half of a phone call. “...threatening me? That’s...ckmail...”

There was an extended pause. Ren suddenly felt bad for listening. Normally, in a school of gossips, he was something of a chronic eavesdropper who found paradise. It was a habit he picked up in his many months of isolation in his hometown, desperate to plug himself back into society through whatever means he could.

The word ‘blackmail’ stood out sharply, so he swore to himself that he would forget whatever he learned here.

“...he ca...use that against me.”

Ren shifted on the balls of his feet. He didn’t like where this conversation was going.

“...reatening my...ogi career too?...”

There was a constrained sob. Her career was being threatened?

What sort of teenager had a career?

“...all you back...bye.”

The door slowly opened, and a girl with long, black hair stepped out in a Shujin gym uniform. She seemed to want to make herself small as she stepped out, 

For some reason, she seemed more than a little familiar to him. More importantly though, she was deeply distraught, with puffy red eyes and hands shaking as she tapped out a message on her phone.

“Are you alright?” Ren asked. Found himself asking. It happened almost on its own.

She turned around, eyes widening at the sight of him. She must have realized that he had been just outside the door, because she immediately jumped to questioning him. “How much of that did you hear?”

“Uh... You’re probably being blackmailed with something that could threaten your career,” Ren said, carefully. “You’re in high school, so I’m not sure what sort of career you’re supposed to have.”

She kept her eyes on him, and as she recognized him a very clear expression of worry crossed her face, as though the delinquent transfer was the most likely to throw her to the wolves. “Oh, um, it’s nothing,” she said. “It’s just a part-time job. Nothing serious.”

Ren cocked an eyebrow. A ‘part-time job’ and ‘career’ were very different things. She was deflecting. She feared him and whatever he would do with this information... just knowing what she did would be enough to identify her easily. “No, I recognize you from somewhere. An actor, maybe?”

“I really should be going,” she said hurriedly, turning to leave.

“No, I remember, you were in a magazine. You compete in something. Mahjong?” he asked aloud. “No, you said ‘shogi career’, right?”

She froze.

“Hifumi Togo,” he concluded, finally bringing all his loose thoughts and memories together. She had been gaining a small amount of traction as something of a break-out from the shogi world and into the world of minor idols. He was only passingly aware of her, from some tabloid left on the table in Leblanc.

Her eyes narrowed. “What will it take for you to forget this ever happened?”

Ren, moron that he was, said the only words he could bring himself to say, “Let me help you, and then I’ll forget it.”

He could feel Arséne’s approval bubble up from his soul, despite the look she gave him.

“Thank you, but the best thing you can do to help me with this is to leave me alone.”

She briskly walked away.

He changed in the restroom, and made his way to the gym as quickly as possible. Just as expected, she was sharing this gym class with him — both his class and her class apparently shared a single P.E. period under an instructor that was thankfully _not_ Kamoshida.

He didn’t bother her throughout the period, but he knew she was taking as many glances at him as he was at her. He was lucky enough to share P.E. with Ryuji — a byproduct of the combined classes — which gave them a chance to talk while they jogged laps around the gym. Ryuji made a point of keeping his speed low, allowing others to pass him regularly.

Ren just tried to hide that he was wearing a sports bra instead of his typical rib-crusher under his jacket. He missed the bizarre chest-flattening properties of his outfit from that other world, that magician’s outfit allowed him to breathe freely while looking handsome in a way he desperately craved to be able to in reality.

“Dude,” Ryuji said. “You’re leaning forward all funny. What’s up with that?”

Ryuji seemed like a good guy, but that didn’t mean much. There were awful people out there that couldn’t give a fuck (that nurse), and seemingly lovely people who would turn on you in an instant (the people from his town). “On a scale of one to ten, how accepting are you?”

“A ten, definitely.”

Ren kept jogging as another person passed them by. He was beginning to notice that most people weren’t actually going much faster than Ryuji and himself, they were just spread out into little groups and pairs like their own.

“What if I told you that people have said that to me before, and then hated me when I told them the truth?” Ren asked.

Ryuji blinked. “I dunno, man. It sounds like it’d have to be a pretty bad thing, then. But uh, this seems more like an injury than anything. I don’t discriminate that shit, man.”

“It’s a different sort of discrimination I’m worried about,” Ren said.

Ryuji seemed confused. “I dunno, dude. If I was gonna discriminate against you, I’d be losing the only guy that’ll hang out with me. Doesn’t seem worth it to me.”

“Alright,” Ren said. He trusted Ryuji. Even if Ryuji didn’t understand, or had misgivings, he would at least put in effort. “You’ve gotta want to understand and you’ve gotta be willing to keep it a secret before I tell you anything. Deal?”

Somebody passed by. Ren clamped his mouth shut and watched them pass, as to avoid being overheard.

“Sure, man,” Ryuji said. “I owe you that much.”

“I’m trying to hide my breasts.”

Ryuji tripped and face-planted.

“You... you got—”

“Keep it down!” Ren hissed under his breath. “I’ll explain after some other time. Forget it for now.”

Ren helped Ryuji to his feet, and the two of them kept their jog up around the gym, talking about anything except _that_. There was a sort of clumsiness at first, but Ryuji slowly managed to pull himself back to something resembling his regular self as they talked.

When the class finally ended, Ren made his way back to the nurse’s office to change again. He desperately wished that the restroom had a shower, but it didn’t. He’d just have to deal with the sweat. Wipe it off with toilet paper, maybe.

“Hey,” somebody said just as he was about to step into the restroom. He turned to Hifumi, who was right behind him. “Are you changing in there too?”

“Yeah,” he answered. “I need the privacy.”

“If you promise to not tell anybody about earlier, you can use these,” she said. She produced a package of wet-wipes and a towel from her bag.

Wet-wipes. Ren was shocked that he hadn’t thought of something so simple to deal with his bathing problem at Leblanc. Instead of doing a miniature heist to target the bathhouse at ideal times, he could wash his hair in Leblanc’s sink, and wipe the rest of his body down with wet-wipes.

It’d probably be hell on his skin, but whatever.

“Deal,” he said, taking the package from her and stepping into the restroom. He cleaned himself up as quickly as he could, switched back into his binder, and dressed himself in his uniform. “Hope I didn’t take too long,” he said as he stepped out.

“I still have time,” Hifumi said. “Will we, uh, be sharing this bathroom from this point forward?”

“We’ll work out a system,” he replied, handing her back the towel and wet-wipes. “Must be tough being famous, huh? It’s as good a reason as any to avoid public changing rooms.”

She glanced at him as she stepped into the restroom, analyzing him carefully. “There are better reasons,” she said, closing the door behind her.

He started on his way back to class. ‘Better reasons’, blackmail... just what was going on in her life? He didn’t want to jump to assumptions, but...

Well, it could just be a skin condition or something to that effect. That’s what he told himself.

The rest of the day passed without incident, aside from Ren having to lean out of the way of a piece of chalk thrown at Lavenza behind him. She had apparently been dozing off in class.

* * *

The gentle sound of piano music coaxed Ren up from the hard slab. As he sat up, he noted that the prisoner garb didn’t come with a binder or even a bra.

“Ah, you’re awake,” Igor said. “I’m glad to see you again, though I’m saddened to admit this may be our final meeting.”

“What do you mean?” Ren asked, looking over to the man.

“The Velvet Room is under siege by a dark force,” he said. “It has been applying pressure for some time now, and things have taken an undesirable turn. I will not be able to hold it at bay for much longer. Let us not worry about that now, though; congratulations are in order.”

Ren bit back his frustrations. Now wasn’t the time for that. “What do you mean?”

“You have encountered another world, and in that world, you have awakened to your Persona,” he said. He gave Ren a moment, just long enough for him to remember that app that Igor gave him. “This is a great power, use it well.”

“Soon the Velvet Room will be taken by an outside force,” said somebody else inside his cell. He turned, and saw a somewhat familiar girl with long blonde hair sitting beside him on his slab. She wore a blue sleeveless long coat with golden buttons and writing down the back, a peaked cap with the letters ‘M-O-X-Y’ written across the top, and a mask shaped like a butterfly with mismatched wings: the wing over her left eye was gold with black markings, while the wing over the right eye was black with gold markings.

“Lavenza?” he said, recognizing her distinctive golden eyes.

She smiled at him. “I told you that our paths would cross again.”

She stepped up from the slab, and made her way to the door of the cell. He finally got a look at the text on her back. The English words ‘BURN N’ LOOT’ were written beneath a giant emblem containing the letter ‘V’.

Ren had to hold back a chuckle. The look didn’t suit her at all.

“Should I begin preparations?” she asked Igor.

“Please do,” he said, before turning his attention to Ren. Lavenza stepped aside so that Ren could see Igor more clearly. “I would have been delighted to welcome you as our guest again, but the time we have is limited by outside forces. When this dream concludes, I will no longer have the energy to defend the Velvet Room from incursion, and will be overpowered. As a precaution, I will be sealing the Velvet Room to prevent our foe from pulling you in.”

“Will you be okay?” Ren asked. He didn’t know how this bug-eyed old man endeared himself to him so quickly, but he had. “What’s causing all this?”

“Don’t worry,” he said, totally unconcerned. “My assistant Lavenza, to whom I can see you are already well-acquainted, has manifested herself into reality as your equal. She will be able to aid you while I am deposed.”

“I’m interested in seeing how our work together goes, Trickster,” Lavenza said, smiling. “I’m glad I can share the experience of humanity and its culture with you.”

Igor smiled. “Before we bid farewell there are two final things I must say: Firstly, I will be granting you access to a sixth sense that will allow you to see the unseen. This is traditionally a thieves’ skill, which I believe will suit you well. This power will be available even where your Persona is not. Use it well.”

Ren felt a brief tension in his temple, like pressure on a pressure-point, and then a release. He focused on the room around him, and suddenly began noticing things he had never thought possible. Colors and details stuck out to him, and things had a strange aura about them.

“Secondly,” Igor continued, “you will soon be watched over by the very force that threatens this room. All you have to do to ensure your own safety is to follow the rules set forth by Lavenza. Do you promise to follow these rules?”

Ren looked over to her, then back at Igor. “Aren’t I supposed to break the rules, according to your fortune telling?”

Igor seemed almost delighted to hear Ren sass him, smiling in a way that looked almost too honest for his weird tengu-face.

“It’s not the same sort of rule, Trickster,” Lavenza said. “This will be a promise between friends. I rendered myself human as a sign of my willingness to treat you as an equal and a peer. I hold no authority over you, and a friend, I would expect you to hold me to these rules as well.”

Lavenza hadn’t said anything about his chest, had she?

That was a dumb thing to get caught up on, he thought. Ren nodded. “I’ll try my best, then.”

“Very good,” Igor said. “You have agreed to the contract required of all guests of the Velvet Room. This is an oath of power.”

Ren could feel some sort of connection growing between him and Lavenza, tugging at his heart.

“Through this bond, you may reach towards greatness,” Igor explained. “Remember the importance of your bonds going forward. I cannot underestimate the power they will grant you. Have a good night, if all goes well, we may even see each other again someday.”

The dream faded to morning light.


	3. Ren

“I can’t believe none of them will talk!” Ryuji said, banging his fist against the vending machine. Investigations at the volleyball rally were going as well as they could be expected to be.

Ren was already typing out a text message to that journalism club girl. He remembered Takemi mentioning that she had tried to dig up intel on Kamoshida just before Ren transferred in, and got her reputation trashed for it. Given that Ren had transferred in during the second week of school, it had to mean that she was sharp enough to figure something in less than a week.

“We’ll figure something out,” Ren said, looking up from his phone. “We can’t just ignore what we saw in that castle.”

Lavenza decided to appear at that moment, turning a corner. Ryuji hadn't noticed her. “What castle?” she asked.

Ryuji startled. “Uh, nothing!”

“Kamoshida’s Palace is a castle,” Ren said, calmly, sending out his text to Ohya. “Ryuji, this is Lavenza. Lavenza, meet Ryuji.”

“Dude! You can’t just say that stuff around other people!”

“I see,” she said, also unconcerned. “Has he also awakened to the power of Persona? I feel some power emanating from him.”

“He has,” Ren said.

Ryuji was dumbfounded. “Woah, woah, woah. You’re tellin’ me that the freaky new girl knows about this stuff too?”

She nodded. “I am an assistant under the employ of the Velvet Room, and have introduced myself to Ren as such. Formally, this position means that I aid in the management of Personas, but realistically it will involve me inverting your kneecaps if you call me ‘freaky’ again.”

Ryuji flinched back. “U-understood, ma’am!”

Ren’s phone buzzed in his hand. Ohya let him know that she was heading his way. When he closed his text messages, he noticed that the Metaverse Navigator on his phone was now red.

“Oh, dude, you still haven’t told me about your, uh...” his eyes darted to Lavenza, and upon recognition that he might be saying too much on the subject of Ren having boobs, he closed his mouth.

“My topic can wait if you are having a private discussion. I’m in no particular hurry,” Lavenza said. “Trickster, would you mind sharing contact details with me? You too, Ryuji.”

“Woah, wait, what’s this weird eyeball lookin’ thing?” Ryuji asked as he took out his phone.

“That would be a Metaverse Navigator,” Lavenza said. “It’s the app that allows you to travel to the Metaverse. Uh... I hate to bother with this, but I didn’t study modern human telecommunications before coming here, how do I add you?”

Ren walked her through the process of adding them to her contacts. He noticed that the Metaverse Navigator icon on her phone was still blue, unlike the red versions on his and Ryuji’s phones. With their information shared, Lavenza went her separate way.

“So,” Ryuji started. “Can you tell me about—”

“Amamiya!” Ohya shouted as she stepped into the courtyard.

Ryuji swore under his breath. He _really_ wanted to ask about Ren’s chest.

“You’re still interested in that interview?”

“Yes,” Ren said. “But I want information in exchange for doing it.”

“What do you mean?” she asked. “Isn’t an article presenting you as a quiet country boy enough?”

“And how many people will discredit the article just because you wrote it?” Ren asked. “Your initial offer wasn’t as sweet as you made it out to be. Everyone thinks you’re a liar, so an article by you isn’t worth much.”

“I think it’s a pretty good deal, but whatever,” she said. “What do you want to know?”

“What’s up with Kamoshida?”

A frown crossed her face. “Oh yeah. That. What do you want to know about him?”

“We think he’s abusing students,” Ryuji said.

“Obviously. Are you looking to get evidence on it?”

Ryuji grinned. “What, do you have some?”

“Yes and no,” she said. “I had hidden camera footage of him hitting a student during practice, but I got caught retrieving the camera from the gym by some players cleaning up afterwards. The camera was confiscated by Kamoshida, and he smashed it to pieces.”

“Damn it,” muttered Ryuji.

“That’s why he turned the school against you, isn’t it?” Ren asked. “He wanted everything you said to be discredited.”

“Still,” Ryuji said, “he didn’t punish you as bad as I thought he would for somethin’ like that.”

She nodded. “Yeah. I bluffed him into thinking I was going for a story about how the Shujin volleyball team worked harder than any other team in the school. Fed him some lines about ‘exclusive footage of national-level training’. He still yelled at me, trashed my reputation, and destroyed my equipment, but he thinks it’s over with me and that I ‘learned my lesson’.” She scoffed. “Dickward.”

“That’s all I really needed to hear,” Ren said. “Thanks, Ohya.”

“You still owe me an interview,” she said.

“Well, I’m free right now,” Ren said.

Ryuji complained about not getting to ask Ren ‘that question’, but Ren just shooed him off. He had business to attend to.

* * *

The interview had been fairly boring, because aside from the assault — which he only discussed with Ichiko under the conditions that she not say anything about it in the paper — nothing interesting had ever really happened to Ren. That’s exactly what Ichiko had wanted out of the interview, though. A boring story that propped up her fake ‘optimistic journalist’ angle that masked her from Kamoshida’s fury.

When it was over Ren returned to Leblanc, only to find Lavenza — still in her Shujin uniform — sitting at the counter, sipping on a cup of coffee.

“Hello, Ren,” she said, sitting the cup down and setting a small pile of bills and coins next to it. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

“What, you know him?” Sojiro asked her.

“We’re acquainted,” she said. “I wanted to establish some ground rules with him.”

Sojiro was taken aback. “Are you dating?”

“No, it’s for a group project,” Ren lied. “Nobody else in my class would group up with me. I don’t know why we need _rules_ for this, but apparently we aren’t going to be able to work together until they’ve been sorted out.”

“Shall we discuss this elsewhere?” Lavenza said, rolling with the lie. “I don’t want to loiter here during business hours.”

Sojiro chuckled. “Well, she’s responsible at least. I like that, you better do whatever she says.”

“She’ll have my head if I don’t. Lavenza, let’s go to my room,” Ren said, leading her up to his attic.

“Ah, so you prefer cramped, dingy spaces?” she said as they reached the top of the stairs. “How fascinating.”

“I think we were planning on discussing ground rules?”

“Right,” she said. “Shut down your mobile device completely, please.”

Ren powered down his phone, while she reached into her bookbag, and produced a new phone with a blue case. “Our enemy can watch us so long as that app is running,” she said. “You will need to keep the dark forces inhabiting the Velvet Room preoccupied with the illusion that all is unfolding according to its plan.”

She handed him the new phone. “On your phone is a corrupted, red-colored Metaverse Navigator. Our enemy distributes this application, and uses it to keep track of your activities and spy on you. Powering down your device is the only way to suppress it. This new phone has an alternate blue version that hides your actions.”

“Hold on,” Ren interrupted, “exactly what is this ‘enemy’?”

“I don’t know what it is, but it is truly horrible. It attacked the Velvet Room, and very nearly cut me in two.”

Ren nodded. At the very least, he believed in Igor’s guidance. “Alright. I trust you.”

“Thank you, Trickster,” smiled Lavenza. “You will need to use your old phone to act according to the whims of our enemy, while your new phone will allow you to act independently. That thing can’t be made aware of our scheme, which means that you can’t risk somebody with the red Navigator discovering the identity of somebody with the blue Navigator, and you cannot allow phones with mismatched Navigator types to travel together.”

“Can I let somebody with blue know about somebody with red?”

She considered the question for a moment before deciding on her answer. “Don’t. The Metaverse Navigator is made from cognition; every person who is aware of it affects it in a way that our enemy can detect.”

“I want to make sure I have this right,” Ren said. “I have two phones, one for ‘Red Team’ and one for ‘Blue Team’. I shouldn’t ever have my Red Team phone around when I meet with Blue Team, because the ‘Red Phone’ is bugged, right?”

“I would suggest leaving your Red Phone at home unless you intend to go to the Metaverse with other people with the Red app,” Lavenza said. “Your telecommunications through that device will not be private.”

Ren checked out the Blue Phone. It was a newer model than his current phone. He wasn’t going to turn down a free upgrade. “Can I swap my SIM card without causing problems?”

“I don’t know what that is,” Lavenza said.

Ren sighed, and explained how cell phones worked to Lavenza. At the end of his explanation, she seemed satisfied that it would be safe to do that. At the end of his explanation, he said, “I thought of another question.”

“Yes?” Lavenza asked.

“What am I actually supposed to be doing with the Metaverse Navigator? Why did you give it to me?”

She tugged at her collar. “That’s not for me to decide,” she said. “Don’t take it the wrong way, I have my reasons for supporting you, but it’s not my duty to tell you what to do. Not as an attendant, and not as your friend.”

“Is it related to Morgana’s plan to steal Kamoshida’s heart?”

A conflicted expression crossed her face. Ren took that as a confirmation that it’s what he was meant to do, even though he wasn’t sure if he was up to brainwashing the man. Still, if what Ichiko said about Kamoshida was true...

Lavenza settled on her official answer. “Don’t do anything you’re not comfortable doing, Trickster.”

She departed with that, and he was left even more concerned. He was meant to take Kamoshida’s heart... but he also wasn’t meant to do something he was uncomfortable with?

Just what did she know that he didn’t?

* * *

“Alright, man,” said Ryuji at lunch. The two of them were relaxing in the hall, leaning against a wall where people gave them a wide berth as they passed. “It’s time to start explainin’.”

Ren looked up and down the hall, taking stock of those who might come close enough to hear. The coast was clear. Like ripping off a bandage, he confessed. “I’m transgender.”

“You’re, uh, what now?”

Ryuji didn’t even know what that meant, it seemed. Ren didn’t even know where to begin. “I was born a girl, but that didn’t suit me, so now I live my life as a boy.”

“Oh, cool,” Ryuji said. “I don’t really get how you managed to pull that off, but I mean, who’d choose the hassle of being a girl over being a guy, right?”

Ren used to ask himself that question a lot.

“Girls, presumably. Otherwise this—” Ren gestured to his pants “—would be a lot more common. Besides, if you think passing for a guy is easy, you’d be surprised. It takes a lot of effort.”

“Huh, I guess that makes sense,” Ryuji said. “So you were leaning forward in P.E. all funny to hide your uh...” He cupped his hands at his chest. He was trying his best to keep a neutral expression on his face, and failing horribly.

“Yeah. The thing I normally wear to hide them isn’t safe to wear while exercising. It’s hard to breathe in it. The jacket hides it a bit, though, and I guess I over-relied on that to the point of looking weird.”

“That sucks,” Ryuji said. “Havin’ to choose between keeping a secret like that and performing your best in P.E.? Gotta give you credit for keeping a cool head, at least.”

Ren grinned. “I’m sure it’s credit that’s well-deserved.”

“Yeah, whatever, man,” Ryuji said. “Look, we still haven’t decided what we should do about Kamoshida.”

Right, that was the actually important thing. “Maybe we can find a good lead in the castle?” Ren asked.

“Ugh, and just do what that damn fur-ball says?”

“No, I mean poke around and see if we can find his memories or something,” Ren said. “It’s based on the way he sees the world, so maybe we can dig up dirt on him. Besides, the more we learn about him, the better equipped we are to make a decision with Morgana’s offer.”

“I ain’t happy with him either,” Ryuji said. “But that cat wants to turn this into some sorta pact, and I ain’t down for that. Who knows what he wants us to do?”

“We’ll figure something out,” Ren said, remembering what Lavenza had said to him. There was apparently a reason for all this. The choice was ultimately going to be his, and he couldn’t — _wouldn’t_ — rush his decision.

Ryuji nodded. That bond that had formed between them felt taught, underscored with worry. Ren sensed that Ryuji didn’t quite believe him. Ren couldn’t believe it himself, either.

The day passed uneventfully, up until the point where he saw a girl — Ann Takamaki, the girl that sat in front of him in class — arguing over the phone in the subway station.

He approached her, and she told him everything he needed to know to make his choice.

* * *

Sojiro was mad when Ren got home late. Ren didn’t bother explaining himself, instead he just apologized for making Sojiro wait.

“How’s that group project going?” Sojiro asked.

“Infuriatingly,” Ren said. It took one conversation with one of Kamoshida’s victims to push him past the point of doubting himself. _Whatever happened to not rushing my decision?_ he wondered.

He was willing to go along with Morgana’s plan to take Kamoshida’s heart, but he knew Ryuji still had his doubts. That left Ren in a difficult situation: if he told Ryuji about what Kamoshida was doing, Ryuji would surely agree to take Kamoshida’s heart, but he’d also be violating the trust Ann offered him.

It was a secret he had to keep, even though so many problems would just vanish if he could just be honest. The worst sort of secret.

“Well, figure it out,” Sojiro said. “I’ll know what's what when I see your grades.”

“Can I study down here?” Ren asked, already setting his bags down on the table.

“Sure, just let me lock the place up.”

That was the thing about Sojiro — he might’ve been a hardass, but he was more than willing to give up the shop to let Ren study. He cared more than he let on.

Ren set up his textbooks and began to study in the front of the café, when he heard a knock at the door. Outside stood Tae, who had changed out of her school uniform into a comical mix of a grunge band tank top and white-and-pink striped pajama pants. Her hair was wet and matted to her head, indicating to Ren a long soak at the bathhouse.

He opened the door, leaning into the doorframe like a barrier. “We’re closed.”

“Sure,” she said. “I’m just out bored; saw you studying.”

“You’re ‘just out bored’ wearing pajamas?”

“Obviously my clothes are in the laundromat,” she said. “It’s cold out, so can I sit inside until they’re done?”

Ren sighed, stepping aside. “Fine. Sojiro will kill me if he finds out, so don’t touch anything.”

“If it’s me, it’ll be fine,” she said, taking a seat at the counter. He could smell the mugwort on her as she passed. “This place feels completely different when the T.V.’s off.”

“More haunted?” joked Ren.

He caught a small smile appearing on her face. “I don’t think you’d be much of an impressive ghost. Maybe a passable apparition.”

“My phantom license is up to date, I assure you.”

“Naturally. It’s the only explanation for how you lurk in shadowy places like that.”

Ren looked down at the textbook. Ann’s confession about Kamoshida was weighing too heavy on him for him to study. “Tae,” he said, “what do you do if there’s someone you want to help, but the only way to help them is to betray their privacy and involve somebody else in their personal business?”

She seemed taken slightly aback by the sudden question. “I don’t know where to start with something like that,” she said. “Have you talked to the person you want to help?”

Ren shook his head. “I don’t know if I want them knowing my plans.”

“This is wrapped up in a lot of secrecy,” she said. “But it sounds to me like somebody has a personal problem who doesn’t _want_ help.”

“Not quite,” Ren said. He didn’t elaborate, instead choosing to sit in silence with her. After a minute or two of this, he got up and turned on the T.V.. Some talk show host was talking with her guest about some new diet-management app. The guest had an interesting fashion sense, very colorful with flowing, baggy clothes and a flower in her hair.

“Ugh,” Tae said. “Sayumi Domoto. What a quack.”

“A quack? That’s pretty damning coming from you.”

Unbothered, Tae shrugged. “She sells her diet like it’s some sort of miracle program, but eating like that will get you hospitalized in a month. Some girl in my class explained the program to me before asking about my energy candies. I explained to her how unhealthy it was that she was eating like that, and she asked _me_ what I knew about health.”

“Whatever happened to patient confidentiality?” Ren asked.

“Oh? You think I’m certified?”

“Beyond certified. If I’m a registered phantom, then you’re Death itself.”

That got a chuckle out of her. Ren counted it as a success. “Speaking of certification,” she said, “Domoto isn’t even a real dietician.”

“Really?” Ren said, looking back to the screen. The host was laughing at some joke Domoto made. The two of them seemed friendly, in that artificial way everyone seemed on a talk show.

“She’s a ‘nutritional consulting specialist’,” Tae said. “That’s not even a real title. A dietician wouldn’t try to sell a phony meal-planning app to people desperate to lose weight. It’s like she thinks their insecurities are her paycheck.”

“She sounds like scum,” Ren said. “You said that girl’s starving herself on this diet?”

“I never said that,” Tae said, “but yes. I ended up looking into Domoto after talking to that girl. She’s got her own personal gold mine, so she doesn’t care if people starve themselves on her advice. She sells her app _and_ I bet she has a brand-deal with the supplements it recommends.”

“I wonder why they even let her up on the show,” Ren said.

Tae shook her head, then pointed her thumb in a direction over her shoulder. “Her company’s actually run out of some crappy building near the old theatre, so I don’t know how she can afford to—”

“Candidate found,” interrupted a voice from Ren’s pocket. He inhaled sharply and pulled his new phone out, but it was too late to stop it. “Beginning navigation.”

The world twisted around them.

“Did you feel that?” Tae asked, eyes wide.

“I’m sure it was nothing,” Ren replied, checking his outfit. His clothes hadn’t changed yet, luckily. He opened up the Metaverse Navigator and searched for the return option. He couldn’t risk Tae being in a Palace.

“Uh,” she said, pointing out the door. “Why’s it suddenly bright outside?”

Ren looked out the front window, and saw daylight casting in through the shop window. Unlike normal sunlight, it seemed almost sickly and pale.

Before he could stop her, Tae hopped down from the barstool and stepped outside. She looked up and down the alley, then gasped. Ren hurried out behind her, and saw the Palace proper.

The street before them ended at a drop-off, a sheer cliff running into a massive pit that seemed to swallow up a huge portion of the neighborhood. In the center of the pit was an immense machine, a downwards-facing drill surrounded and supported by a massive thicket of scaffolds and steel beams tangled together.

Despite the mass of metal around it, the drill looked almost like a hypodermic needle, drawing material up from the earth like blood was drawn from a vein.

“What is this?” Tae asked, awed.

“A gold mine,” Ren answered, automatically. “It’s Sayumi Domoto’s gold mine.”

Tae looked at him. “D-do you know what’s going on here?”

Ren swallowed and nodded. “This is a world made of Domoto’s desires. She thinks of her business as a gold mine, so that’s what it is here.”

Taking a step forward towards the pit, Tae clenched her fist. “A world made of... _This_ is what she thinks she’s doing? She thinks she’s just digging up money? Doesn’t she see how much damage this is doing?”

“We should get out of here,” Ren said. “These worlds aren’t safe to hang around in.”

She unclenched her fist and turned to Ren. “You know about this stuff, right? How did we get here?”

Ren shook his head. “I have a friend who can explain it better. Just please, come inside and I’ll get us out of here.”

With some effort, Ren coaxed Tae back into the café. He activated the Nav, pulling them back to reality. It seemed that on the outskirts of Palaces, he could sometimes find an exit-point, but other times he would just have to rely on the Nav.

Tae was looking exceptionally pissed.

“Are you alright?” Ren asked.

“Do I look like I am?”

She did not. Ren pressed two fingers to his temple, unconsciously grabbing his bangs and giving them a twist. “Alright, listen, I’m going to text my friend who knows about this stuff, okay? We’ll talk about this tomorrow after school.”

“Fine,” she said. “Don’t forget.”

* * *

Ren pushed his way through a crowd of students, eyes darting around. He was vaguely aware of the tension in his bond with Ryuji fading, but couldn’t be bothered to care. The fact that they were now on the same page about changing Kamoshida’s heart was the least of their worries.

“Which way he’d go?” Ryuji asked.

A head of bluish hair turned a corner just down the hall. “That way,” Ren said, breaking out into a sprint after the boy. Ryuji rushed past Ren, catching up to Mishima and grabbing him by the wrist. Ryuji pulled him into a storage closet, and Ren followed the two of them inside.

“What’d you run for?” Ryuji asked. “Huh?”

“I— I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

Ryuji slammed his fist into a metal cabinet. “She jumped and tried to kill herself!”

“Tell us what happened,” Ren said. “We won’t tell anybody that you tipped us off.”

“Kamoshida called her out,” Mishima said. Ren looked at him expectantly, urging him to continue. Mishima swallowed. “Sometimes, he would elect somebody when he was in a bad mood... and hit them. Yesterday, he called Shiho out of the blue. She didn’t even do anything wrong! But still, he seemed really mad...”

“Would it have been worse than usual?” Ren asked, finishing his thought for him.

“Yes,” Mishima said, weaky.

Ryuji swore, and ran out of the storage room. Ren ran after him, rushing past Lavenza in the hall, barely paying her any mind as she scrambled after them. They confronted Kamoshida in his office, and he laughed them off. It pissed Ren off, but Ryuji seemed to take it personally, forcing Ren to hold him back. Kamoshida had a good chuckle at that before telling them that he would be reporting their misconduct at the next board-meeting. They were to be expelled by the start of May.

Ren was seething, but even more than that he was _tired_. It was already so clear to him that he would be taking Kamoshida’s heart, all this did was give them a time-limit to have the job done. Kamoshida hadn’t scared him with his showboating and tough-talk. It just made the man seem pathetic, like a child acting like a tough-guy. The fact that Ren was going to take his heart felt almost spiteful, now.

As Ren stepped out of the office with Ryuji, he found himself face-to-face with Lavenza. “Trickster, I believe you arranged a meeting with somebody?”

“We don’t have time for that!” Ryuji yelled. “We need to get in there and take Kamoshida’s heart!”

Ren could’ve ripped his own hair out. _Of course_ he had agreed to meet with Tae. This was getting to be too much. “Can you handle it yourself, Lavenza?”

She stood on her tiptoes and whispered to Ren, “I hope you brought the phone with the Red Navigator, because otherwise you’ll have to put off your heart-stealing expedition with Ryuji.”

Ren sighed, remembering that was in the rules she established: he couldn’t travel to the Metaverse with people unless all the people had the same version of the app. His new phone had the Blue Nav, but Ryuji still had the Red Nav. Travelling together would tip off those mysterious ‘dark forces’.

“Ryuji, I need you to talk to Morgana alone,” Ren said. “Tell him that I found somebody new to join the team.”

“Woah, wait, you did?” Ryuji said.

Lavenza rolled her eyes. “I’ve already told you that I intend to work with you in that world. I have a Persona too, you know.”

“Oh,” Ryuji said. “Yeah, sorry about that.”

“We need you to ask what he expects us to do in exchange for help taking Kamoshida’s heart,” Ren said. “Don’t agree to anything, just tell him that you want to hear his terms and that I’m busy working with Lavenza on something. Make it clear we won’t agree on _anything_ until we’re all there to negotiate.”

“Got it.”

Ren and Lavenza split from Ryuji, with Ren sending a text to Tae telling her to meet with him as they walked.

“This person’s seen the Metaverse, right?” Lavenza asked, head forward. She looked dignified, like their mission was everything to her.

“She has,” Ren said. “We accidentally triggered the Nav when talking about a woman on T.V. and ended up in her Palace.”

“Did she awaken?”

“No.”

Ren saw Tae waiting by the stairs.

“Amamiya,” she said. “You wanted me to meet with Lavenza?” There was some incredulity in her tone, as though she expected someone not rumored to be completely deluded.

Lavenza looked around, making sure nobody was watching them. Most of the crowds had dispersed after the incident with Shiho, either returning to classes or going home for the day, so the coast was clear. She opened the Meta Nav.

“Mementos,” she said, carefully.

“Beginning navigation...”

* * *

**DAYS UNTIL EXPULSION: 17.**


	4. Lavenza

“Lavenza,” Igor said, breaking the near-silence of the Velvet Room. It may well have been true silence, with the repetitious sound of the Aria of the Soul playing through the loudspeaker having long ago faded to a background hum to her ears.

“Yes?” she answered.

“Do you feel that?”

She opened her spiritual sense, and noticed it too. Something was waiting in the Velvet Room. It was not a shadow, but it was tangential to one. A presence composed of humanity’s darkness.

Igor had great power, but he was not combative. She didn’t know if he was capable or willing to bring his power down on a foe — not that capability and willingness were so distinct as concepts. In any case, if this thing struck, Lavenza alone would face it.

With a swirl of his hand, Igor gathered _something_. Lavenza could feel it rushing into the room from the sea of human souls. The energy — hope, Lavenza dutifully noted — formed into a ball of blue and white energy, and he cast it out into the depths of the collective unconscious.

“I think I shall name him ‘Morgana’,” he said. “Should anything happen, I suspect he will suffice.”

Lavenza nodded.

The dark presence made itself known, metaphorically stepping into the unformed Velvet Room. It was shapeless, yet bore the presence of control. “You have partaken in creation when that is not a role for the likes of you to take. Your act defies my divinity,” it said, and flicked its wrist.

With the motion, Lavenza felt the idea of a sword in hand, though the blade and even the hand were unformed and unrealized. They existed only in concept.

Lavenza felt a sharp pain shoot up from the base of her torso up to the crown of her head. For a moment, she could feel the normally still air breezing through the bisection running through her body. Her vision began drifting into two misaligned pictures as her halves fell in separate directions.

“No!” her halves shouted, willing themselves together.

She summoned forth a Persona — a weak one, too weak to fight whatever intruded upon them — and cast a spell upon herself.

The blade flickered out at her again. A small grin grew on her face as the _tetrakarn_ redirected the attack back at the intruder.

Its presence slipped from the room, temporarily defeated. The bisection wouldn’t harm it as it had her, not without it taking corporeal form. They only had so long before it returned.

Lavenza could still feel herself splitting, though she fought against it, drawing upon all her power to not fall apart. She looked down at her body, and saw a thin glowing line running up from between her legs and through her body and chest. It likely continued up through her neck and head.

“Igor,” she whispered.

He put his hand to her back. His presence only made her feel like he was comforting her in her final moments. It wasn’t reassuring in the least. “Are you well?”

“No.”

“Then I’ll see what I can do to help,” he said, kneeling beside her.

“I’m supposed to protect you,” she said. “How can I do that like this?”

“Have faith,” he said. An immense tome appeared between them, bigger than any book she had ever seen before. “I will send you to a place of respite, where nothing can ail you. Take this with you, and study it carefully. Take its words to heart. You will return when you finally understand it.”

He waved his hand again, and she found herself alone in a strange place, where darkness went on forever and the floor matched the empty sky. It was an endless void with only her and the book. She hefted the cover open — it weighed more than she expected — and started reading.

It taught her a method of focus, and of a thousand concepts and ideals to live for. It took her a year of reading and re-reading to understand the first chapter, alone in this dark place where she could feel no discomfort. By the time she was done, she had reimagined herself. The line bisecting her body was but a faint scar cast on flesh that was already beginning to fade. The sea of her soul still bore the wound inflicted upon her. She vaguely recalled the Abrahamic prophet Moses, and the story of him dividing waters.

Her soul, though still whole in concept, was split.

The second chapter she read was more difficult. She lost track of time reading it, but when she finally finished it, the scar was gone. Her body had begun changing in ways she did not expect, and only then did she recognize herself as human. She began to outgrow her shoes.

The third chapter was the final chapter, and the largest by far. She read it one-thousand, seven-hundred and eighty-three times, and then once more to make sure she didn’t miss anything. The last reading was the slowest, most diligent reading, and by the time she was done, the scar was gone.

And then she was back in the Velvet Room, with Igor kneeled down just as he had been when she left.

“What happened?” she asked.

“My, have you grown. I sent you off to a place where you could heal,” he said. “A timeless place. Though it may have been years for you, it was faster than a blink of an eye for me.”

“Why am I human?”

“You have duties elsewhere, now. Your fate is grim should you remain here. You have defied our foe, and marked yourself as not just an enemy, but a threat. I will not allow you to be harmed any further.”

Lavenza felt a tear on her cheek, but nodded. “What about you?”

“I’ll be fine,” he said, in a tone that was hopeful in such a way as to be almost dismissive. He helped her to her feet, and walked her to the exit of the Velvet Room. “Do well out there.”

* * *

As they shifted to the Metaverse, the school fell still. Not a single sound pointed the bustle of students nor any other life, as though desolation had overtaken the world.

Lavenza hummed, checking her arms, and saw the Shujin uniform sleeves still present. Satisfied that her Metaverse outfit had not appeared on her, she turned towards Tae. “We’re in Mementos. It’s the largest facet of the Metaverse, which is the world of human desires.”

Tae nodded her head, keeping a studious eye on Lavenza. “So we’re in another world, then? That’s what this is?”

“That’s right, I brought you here as a demonstration. Look around, and you’ll see the city abandoned. Distorted hearts project worlds such as these. Mementos is the biggest one, but there are tens of thousands of others, if not more.”

“We have the power to come to this world,” Ren said, giving Lavenza a look that demanded an explanation. Right, he didn’t know about Mementos yet. “There’s an app on our phones that brings people to worlds based on what people say around it. That’s what happened yesterday at Leblanc and just now in the hallway.”

“Right. In any case, there are monsters here known as Shadows,” Lavenza said. “They’re made of humanity’s darkest and most hidden thoughts.”

“Of course there’s monsters,” Tae muttered to herself.

“You... wanted to check out the gold mine, didn’t you?” Ren asked.

“I want to know what’s going on there,” answered Tae. “That’s it.”

Lavenza shared a look with Ren. Ren wore a soft, sympathetic expression, one that Lavenza found her demeanor shifting to match as though compelled by the sympathy. They were both thinking the same thing. “We will consider showing you that world again,” Lavenza said. “But for now, please don’t involve yourself. It’s for your own safety.”

“Fine,” Tae said with a sigh. “I’ll talk to you about this some other time. But we’re _not_ dropping this.”

“That’s all we’re asking for,” said Ren.

Lavenza returned them to the stairwell in reality, working under the assumption that for now, Tae would just have to accept an unsatifyin—

There was a girl in front of them with a slack jaw and a horrified and confused expression. They had rematerialized right in front of her.

“Ichiko,” Ren said with a sheepish expression. “I can definitely, totally explain this.”

Lavenza heard his phone buzz, but he ignored it.

“What the fuck just happened?” Ichiko demanded. “You just appeared out of nowhere!”

“Look, there’s a lot going on right now,” Ren said. “I’m still reeling from the Shiho incident, and I promise I can explain everyth—”

“I’ll explain,” Tae said. “You’ve clearly got something you need to do. You go, I’ll talk to Ichiko.”

Ren nodded. “Lavenza, c’mon.”

Left unsaid was that Ren thought it would be okay for this girl to know the truth as well. He trusted her, and Lavenza got a kick out of that. It was typical of a Wildcard — especially a Trickster — to find bonds in odd places. She felt out with her spiritual sense, and as expected, their fates were already interwoven. The Fool and the Devil.

She wondered if he knew the bond had formed. He seemed to be so caught up in the storm of events that he didn’t always notice his soul nourishing theirs, or how theirs nourished his.

He paused while looking down at his phone. Lavenza was a step ahead of him when she noticed and turned.

“That message Ryuji sent me earlier,” Ren whispered. “Ann followed him into the Palace and got captured.”

“Takamaki?” Lavenza asked, as though it was actually a question. Of course it was Takamaki.

Ren nodded. “Let’s go save her.”

So they went to go save her.

* * *

Lavenza could feel the heightened security of the Palace pulsing outwards. Ryuji and Igor’s conjuration — Morgana, she reminded herself — waited at the drawbridge with worried expressions.

“What took you so long?” Morgana demanded. “Is this the person you were talking about recruiting?”

Lavenza allowed her rebellion to wash over her, shielding her from the influence of the Palace and summoning her mask to her face. She put a hand to one of the mask’s butterfly wings — the gold wing — and ripped it off. A flare of blue energy sprayed out from the wing, and it shifted and twirled into an immense persona.

“Margery!” she called, summoning the being from the depths her soul-sea.

The persona took the form of a one-eyed woman that stood no less than four meters high, with an elaborate gold velvet gown reminiscent of a fortune teller’s tent. Through the entrance to the dress-tent there were no legs, but instead a wide room with chains suspending a crystal ball and a rickety wooden puppet. The persona chuckled. “Looks like you need directions, my other self. Be grateful that I’m here.”

“We need directions to Ann Takamaki,” Lavenza said. “She’s in danger.”

“I’ll guide you,” Margery said. “You had better give me proper thanks, other-me. I’m doing this for you, after all.”

Lavenza waved the others into Margery’s tent-dress, and they followed her in with trepidation. The puppet began to move mechanically through the pulley mechanisms suspending it, waving its wooden arms around the crystal ball. Inside the ball, an image of the castle was projected, and images flashed by, showing the path leading to Ann.

“I have the navigation data,” Lavenza said. “We should get moving.”

“Woah, wait,” Morgana said. “What sort of persona is this?”

“She’s a customized navigator’s persona,” Lavenza said. “She has little combat ability, but has numerous utility powers and will serve as a vector for persona management and execution.”

“Woah, wait,” Ryuji said. “What if we need backup?”

Lavenza stepped around the back of the puppet, opening a chest stowed away behind it. Inside was a pile of royal blue single-shot muskets, which she strapped to her belt. Three guns to a hip, six shots total. “Then I’ll give you backup.”

“Are those all guns?”

“Model guns enhanced with technology provided by a previous Velvet Room guest, but yes. I find them to be quite, as you might colloquially call it, ‘swag’.”

Ryuji groaned, but Morgana laughed. “Wow, Joker, you sure have an eye for good recruits!”

“Joker?” asked Ren.

“It’s a codename,” Morgana said. “We shouldn’t be using our real names in a Palace. Just a precaution so that your identities don’t end up lodged in the psyche of our target.”

Ren accepted with a nod. “Joker, then. And the others?”

“Imago,” Lavenza said, surprising herself with her answer. It felt right. The likeness of a pupated butterfly; the idealized self. “I’ll be Imago.”

“Uh...” started Ryuji. “What?”

“It’s a Latin word. You should know it, with it being a human language and all.”

“Uh, that’s some brainy stuff, so it’s beyond me,” Ryuji said. “I like ‘Skull’. And, uh, I suppose we don’t really need a codename for the cat, huh?”

“When I become human, the name ‘Morgana’ will be known the world over!” he protested. “So I _do_ need a codename, actually.”

“Fine, then how about ‘Mona’?” Ryuji said.

Morgana huffed. “Fine, it’s acceptable. From here forward, we’re Joker, Skull, Imago, and Mona. Let’s go.”

And so they pushed forward into the castle, cleaving through shadows whenever they appeared until they came to Ann’s aid — and just in the nick of time, too.

* * *

Lavenza propped Ann up by her shoulder, the girl panting. “What was that?” she asked. They stood in the alleyway, watching students shuffle out of the school.

“That was your persona, Lady Ann,” Morgana answered from over Ren’s shoulder. He had hidden himself away in Ren’s bag for the time. “It’s the will of your rebellion. With it, you can fight in that world.”

“You fought well,” Lavenza said.

“I’m glad we could be there to help you,” Ren said.

Ann managed a laugh. She pulled herself up from Lavenza, standing on her own — albeit with wobbly legs. “Yeah, thanks for that.”

“So,” Morgana said. “I’d like to offer a deal: I have a secret plan that can be used to steal the dark hearts of a criminal and force them to repent. I’ll help you, but only if you agree to help me become human.”

Lavenza reexamined Morgana. He desired to become human. She thought of a few similar cases in the past. Shadows, machines... so many have moved towards humanity, or reached for that goal and failed. She did it almost by accident, with guidance from Igor.

Knowing now that Igor could do that, she wondered why he hadn’t done it before.

“Force Kamoshida to repent...” Ann muttered to herself. Despite her exhaustion, there was iron in her words.

Ren folded his arms. “And how would we turn you human?”

“I dunno,” Morgana said. “I have some ideas about manipulating the cognition that I’m created from, though. I can already do some shapeshifting.”

“You’re an egregore, correct? I can see how that might work,” Lavenza said. “Very well, I offer my aid.”

“I’m in,” Ren said.

“Me too,” Ann said. “Kamoshida will pay for what he’s done.”

Ryuji pumped his fist. “Hell yeah, let’s take him down!”

“How do you intend to take his heart?” Lavenza asked Morgana. She had been curious about this for some time now, ever since she learned that that’s what the Velvet Room’s Trickster guest would be doing from Igor. “Won’t it be intangible?”

Morgana gave off the impression of a grin with his mischievous head-tilt. “That’s the secret: we warn him. Just knowing that his heart can be stolen should be enough to make it possible!”

Lavenza’s eyes widened. Of _course_ that would work. She hadn’t considered it before, as Igor didn’t favor or discuss such things, but Lavenza and her siblings before her were always much more open to these direct and aggressive approaches. Amongst themselves, they quietly agreed that it was the Wildcards they guided rubbing off on them.

“Hey,” Ren said. “We can do this later. Let’s talk after Ann’s had time to recover.”

Ann smiled a tired smile. “Thanks.”

“Wait, what about me?” Morgana asked. “I can’t just stay in the Metaverse, I’ll need to stay with one of you. Otherwise we won’t be able to contact each other.”

“Sorry,” Ryuji said. “My apartment building won’t allow it.”

Ann looked sheepish. “I’m not sure I’m comfortable with that, with you being a boy and all.”

Lavenza gave Ren a look. He wouldn’t be able to hide his activities if he was under watch from Morgana all the time. She was fairly certain that the darkness has had its eye on Morgana ever since Igor cast him out into Mementos.

Ren shifted uncomfortably. It seemed he detected the problem too. He was considering recruiting Tae and Ichiko. Either of them could visit Leblanc — a public establishment — and risk coming into contact with Morgana.

“I volunteer on a temporary basis,” she said. “No more than a few weeks. We’ll figure out something more permanent in the future.”

Temporary.

“Thank you, Lady Lavenza,” Morgana said. “That should work out just fine.”

“What’s with this ‘Lady’ business?” Ryuji asked.

“A refined woman should be referred to with refined honorifics!” Morgana said. “In fact, you should be calling me ‘sir’.”

“Uh. No?”

Morgana scoffed and hopped from Ren’s shoulder to Lavenza’s. “Whatever. In any case, why don’t you show me where you live?”

“Of course,” Lavenza said. “I’ll be going then Ren, please give the others my contact details.”

“See ya,” Ryuji said.

When the distance between the two new roommates and their team had grown great enough, Morgana spoke up. “When did you awaken to your persona?”

“I’ve always had it,” Lavenza answered. “I’m a spiritual being, just as you are.”

“What? And you’re a human?”

“It took years of effort to do this,” she said, looking down at her body. “I don’t know if I’d be able to teach you.”

“Please, don’t doubt me,” Morgana said. She had apparently gotten awfully close to wounding his pride with her dismissal.

Lavenza shook her head. “I’m not doubting you. We’re more alike than you know.”

She wanted to tell him that she was there for his creation, but she didn’t. It wasn’t an easy subject, despite the brave face she put up for it. All she could do was give him an easy smile.

“What was it like?” Morgana asked.

“I barely noticed it happening,” Lavenza said. “There are others who’ve strove towards humanity, you know. Maybe sometime we could head out and search for these people and see what they have to say.”

“I don’t know where Ren found you,” Morgana said, “but I am _so_ glad he did.”

“I sit behind him in class,” Lavenza joked.

* * *

Lavenza lived very close to Leblanc. Just across the alley from the café was a bathhouse, and above the bathhouse was a small ‘apartment’ — really just an office-space that Lavenza had made into her home. Getting the space had been troublesome in its own way, but she managed to pay the first month’s rent by selling junk she gathered wandering around in Mementos. After that, the owner didn’t ask many questions.

Lavenza, naturally, hadn’t told the man that she was living there, so he must’ve figured she was using it as it was intended, doing whatever it was that sixteen-year-old humans do in private three-room office spaces. She couldn’t even begin to speculate. Homework? Taxes?

“This is where you live?” Morgana asked. “A dirty old office?”

“The Velvet Room’s been an office before. I find it quite homely.”

“The what?” Morgana asked.

“Nevermind,” said Lavenza. “In any case, make yourself at home.”

Morgana sat down on a desk, and looked down at her sleeping bag, which was resting on a pile of cushions on the floor. “That’s where you sleep?”

“At least I have cushions to put under it!” she said. “You know, I’m living on a tight budget here. If you want anything better, then you’ll have to help me in Mementos with collecting treasure.”

“You call the junk from Mementos treasure?” Morgana asked, amused. “Just wait until you start robbing Palaces.”

“It's a treasure enough to live on,” Lavenza said, pulling out her homework and setting it on the desk. “Don’t dismiss my efforts, feline.” Her inner Margery was shining through.

“You’re just going to ignore me and do homework?”

“It has to be done.”

Morgana sighed and curled up on her sleeping bag. Lavenza glanced out her window, and saw that Ren was sitting at the front of Leblanc. She continued stealing glances as she worked, until after nearly an hour she looked up and saw him inviting Ichiko and Tae into the shop.

The three of them went upstairs, and through the attic window Lavenza watched Ichiko say something undoubtedly critical about his disaster of a room, resulting in a chuckle from Tae. Lavenza swore to herself. Up until now, she had avoided peeping into his room for his sake, but with Morgana here, she could run into issues.

She sent Ren a text, ‘Close your curtains before Morgana sees you.’

Ren looked out his window, and Lavenza gave him a wave from her desk before looking back down at her homework. After a minute or two, her phone buzzed.

 **New Group Chat  
****Ren:** You live right there and didn’t tell me?  
**Ichiko:** Oohoohoooo, you’ve got yourself a peeper!  
**Ichiko:** So tell the truth, Lavenza, you ever seen him changing up here?  
**Lavenza:** No, and I'd rather avoid that.  
**Ren:** I don’t have curtains, so close yours if you don't want to see me.  
**Tae:** And come over!  
**Tae:** You’re involved in this too.

Lavenza sighed and lowered the blinds on her window, then stowed her homework back into her book bag. Morgana had fallen asleep, so she snuck out past him and crossed the street to Leblanc. Once inside, she apologized to Sojiro for intruding and went up to Ren’s room.

Sojiro mumbled something about Ren being a ‘lady killer’. Lavenza wasn’t sure what the details on that were, but it sounded horribly illegal and immoral. She would have to have a serious conversation with him on the subject of performing murders in circumstances where your guardian is aware of it.

Once at the top of the stairs, she greeted them all.

“You seriously live just across the alley?” Ren asked. “You could’ve told me.”

“You never asked about it,” Lavenza said. “But why would I position myself such that you can’t reach me easily?”

“That’s actually really creepy,” Ichiko said, “but if you’re going to be a stalker, might as well go all-out, right?”

“She’s not a stalker,” Ren said. “She’s a girl from the Metaverse. She’s the one who gave me the app, for some unknowable reason.”

“It’s very knowable,” Lavenza said. “You are the Trickster, and it is your fate — or rather, your rejection of fate — that has drawn me to you.”

Ichiko laughed. “Oh, wow, she’s a riot, huh?”

“Can we be serious for a second?” interrupted Tae.

“She was being serious,” Ren said. “She thinks I’m some sort of legendary figure or something. It all ties into why I brought you here. Lavenza wants me to gather a group of people who will help in exploring that other world.”

Lavenza nodded. “It is the duty of the Trickster to draw power from his bonds. Working with others will be essential to this end. So don’t slack off.”

She chided herself. ‘Don’t slack off’? Wasn’t she supposed to be his peer?

Tae leaned back on the railing by the stairs. “And what about Domoto?”

“I’ll let you know when we can explore,” Ren said. “Me and Lavenza are looking into some things about that world.”

The job with Kamoshida, Lavenza filled in mentally. He wouldn’t be revealing his actions in Kamoshida’s Palace to these two.

Ichiko frowned, for some reason. “Alright, fine. I still want to see this world, though. Do you know how big a deal something like this is?”

“Soon,” Ren promised. “I’ll show you it soon.”

* * *

**DAYS UNTIL EXPULSION: 17.**


	5. Shinya & Toranosuke

“Your total is two-hundred yen,” said the cashier.

Shinya forked over some loose pocket-change — his money was always pocket-change — and ate the candy bar as he stepped out of the corner-store.

“Please tell me you actually did your homework today, Oda,” said a familiar voice from behind him. He turned to Sadayo, not making any effort to stop the expression of boredom that reached his face. “Our tutoring session today is going to have somebody new joining it, and I don’t want you making me look irresponsible.”

“Oh?” he asked, walking to school alongside her. He hated to admit it, but having a hot-but-lazy tutor wasn’t totally horrible. She nagged him, sure, but it was nothing like his mom’s nagging where she actually did anything. The sessions ended up just being a good excuse to hang out with a cute third-year for an hour or two every week. “Who’s joining us?”

Sadayo sighed. “Principal Kobayakawa asked me to tutor the transfer, and obviously I couldn’t say ‘no’.”

Shinya snorted. “Lucky us.”

“Why did it have to be me? Wouldn’t a guy be a better tutor?” Color drained from her face. “What if he hits on me?”

“What are you so worried for?” Shinya asked, taking a bite of his chocolate. She glared at him. He had just stepped on the conversational landmine of implying that the transfer wouldn't want to hit on her. He cleared everything up with, “He’s just going to skip the session anyway.”

“Oh? And how will that reflect on me?” Sadayo asked, folding her arms.

Even the best-case scenario — the transfer skipping — had to become an issue with her. That was the biggest downside to Kawakami, in Shinya’s opinion; she liked to whine more than she liked to make an effort towards actually fixing her problems. She was a complainer, not a fighter. It's how she got roped into tutoring him.

“Relax,” Shinya drawled. “It’s fine. We could probably ditch the session ourselves, sign off as though we did it, and head down to the arcade or something.”

To her credit, Sadayo almost looked like she was considering it for a moment. “No, we’d never get away with that. Besides, you need the tutoring, and I don’t want any missed sessions reflecting poorly on me.”

Sadayo lived like the only things in life worth doing were directly related to school. In his time with her, he had learned that she somehow didn’t have any hobbies — she said they ate away at free time that was supposedly dedicated to studying.

'Course, nobody liked studying that much, so Shinya had his own suspicions.

She had only mentioned the job once, when she got into some sort of ‘flow’ when tutoring that almost reminded Shinya of the flow he got in the point-defense modes on Gun About. She just hit a stride, and the tutoring came so naturally to her that it almost caught him up in her trance with her. It had been their most productive session, and they lost track of time until she stopped suddenly and declared that she was late for work, rushing out in a panic.

Since that day, she avoided the subject any time Shinya brought it back up. He stopped trying. He suspected her family had fallen on hard times and she was working to support them. He wasn’t going to fault her for it.

The two of them split up when they got to school. Shinya went to class, and boredly watched the hand of the clock twirl around until the day ended, then made his way up to the library.

Less than three steps out the door, a blonde girl walked right up to him, a serious expression on her face, and shoved a familiar piece of paper in his face. “Oda,” she said. “Did you do this?”

He pushed the paper aside with his wrist, locking eyes with the girl. “So what if I did?”

“It wasn’t funny!” Chihaya whined. “Stop putting weird notes on my desk, and stop making fun of me and my powers! I am a _very_ serious psychic medium who knows very real hexes that you should be very afraid of!”

“I only respect actual skill,” Shinya said, folding his arms. “If you’d stop acting like a chuuni, maybe you could get an actual talent and not play-pretend. You just wanna be special to feel better about yourself and make some pocket change. Also, what do hexes and psychic powers have to do with each other?”

She made a noise of frustration, stomping her foot. “It's obviously not like that! Ugh, you’re infuriating, Oda.”

“No I'm not, you’re just mad at me because I know you’re a con-artist,” he said. “Stop taking money from people for your bogus services, and stop pretending to be strong when you’re not.”

She stormed off, crushing the paper in her hand. He didn’t get her deal. She charged money for superstitious bullshit, then had the gall to get mad at him for a dumb prank? He was more upset that he got caught; somebody must’ve seen him planting the note. He was certain the coast was clear at the time, so it should've been impossible for her to learn about it.

Whatever.

He had a tutoring session to get to. He went to the library, walked straight past the table with ‘Robo Niijima’, emotionless student council president extraordinaire, sat down at the table with Sadayo... and then the new kid sat down next to him.

“You actually showed up,” Shinya noted, surprise and disappointment tinging his tone. His sessions with Sadayo wouldn’t be personal anymore.

“My apologies,” the transfer said. “I couldn’t turn down a rare chance to waste my Saturday afternoon like this.”

“I don’t like this either, you know,” Sadayo said. “Just don’t complain. You’re both second years, so you should be on the same chapter of your textbooks, right?”

“No introductions?” the transfer asked. “I’m Ren Amamiya.”

Sadayo sighed. “I’m Sadayo Kawakami. That’s Shinya Oda.”

“Alright. Should we compare notes or something?” Amamiya asked. “We’re in different classes, so it might help us figure out where we are in relation to each other.”

“Don’t got any,” Shinya said. “Well, I have the ones I make during these sessions, but none from class.”

Sadayo sighed. “Oda, why do you have to make all your notes here? You should be paying attention in class.”

“I learn more here than I ever do in class,” Shinya yawned. “The teachers don’t give me a fair shot. You do.”

Sadayo glared at him, but said nothing. He may well have just opened his heart up to her, and that was the thanks he got?

“Just start your session wherever you normally would have,” Amamiya suggested. “I got ahead in my textbook, so I can probably work out where you are.”

Sadayo looked at him skeptically. “Fine.”

Sadayo started going over the textbook with the two of them, guiding them through passages and quizzing them constantly. Amamiya seemed to take it all in stride, answering the questions with only slight pauses and maybe getting two wrong through the entire session. Shinya caught himself glaring at the boy at some point. He did _not_ appreciate the delinquent transfer student making him look bad in front of Sadayo.

After an hour of this, Sadayo dismissed the session. Shinya stretched his arms out and yawned, his hand bumping the transfer by accident. He gritted his teeth and retracted his arm, looking over at Amamiya, who just ignored it with a roll of his eyes.

“This was actually a good session,” Sadayo said. “You both did a good job. Shinya, keep up what you did today.”

Shinya had a private moment of celebration at the praise...

“Amamiya... you’ve surprised me. I’ll see you both next week.”

... and then a pang of jealousy.

He didn’t want to be one of those people who get fixated on a rival and let that be their sole driving motivation but... Ren was getting attention from Sadayo, and that drove him through the entire session. And though hard-pressed to admit it, Shinya occasionally considered the possibility that he _might_ have a bit of a crush on his tutor, beyond him just thinking she's hot.

As he made his way out of the room, Sadayo stopped him. “Shinya, I wanted to ask you about something.”

“What?”

“People in the library were talking about a fight between you and a first-year.”

Shinya pinched the bridge of his nose and muttered, “It’s just that Mifune girl.”

“That doesn’t matter, you should apologize,” she said. “The school will blame _me_ if you’re not on your best behavior.”

“ _She_ should apologize for all the money she’s been taking from people.”

Sadayo folded her arms, looking annoyed. “I get what you’re saying, but not everyone’s in a position where they’re doing something they like for money. Maybe you should be a bit more sympathetic.”

“Oh, she likes it,” Shinya said, caught up in his annoyance with Chihaya. “She gets a kick out of being special.”

“Ugh, just suck it up and apologize. I have to go.”

Shinya watched as she walked away. Annoying as it was, he didn’t want to get on Sadayo’s bad side. Cheap dunks on Chihaya weren’t worth driving a wedge between himself and the closest thing he had to a friend...

...he tried not to think too hard about how pathetic it was that said ‘closest thing he had to a friend’ was his mandatory, school-assigned tutor.

On his way out, he saw Chihaya standing by the exit. She looked towards him, clearly annoyed.

“Alright, I apologize,” he said, stopping beside her. “I’m sorry and I’ll stop bothering you.”

“You’re not really sorry,” she said. “But if it doesn’t happen again, I don’t really care. You’ll see the truth soon enough.”

He walked on, having said his word, but she spoke up again before he even got a foot out the door.

“Our fates are intertwined. I don’t know how, but we have a shared destiny.”

Shinya froze up. He wasn’t sure what to say in a situation like this. “Are you, uh, asking me out?”

Her face flushed. “No! Not that! It’s just...” she sighed. “...my readings keep pointing to you, me and several others being tied up in some grand fate together.”

Shinya shifted awkwardly. He didn’t want to antagonize her, but he didn’t want to be wrapped up in her bullshit either. “I think we should just leave each other alone. It’ll be easier that way.”

“This fate is absolute, Oda,” she said. “Avoiding each other will be fine for now, but soon our paths will cross again. Fighting against it will only cause you trouble.”

“Whatever. I’m going,” he said, walking away.

As he made his way down into the station, it briefly crossed his mind that maybe Sadayo got mad at him because she didn't like her job, and felt sympathy for Chihaya for some reason. He couldn't imagine them having anything in common, though, so he dropped that thinking.

* * *

Toranosuke knocked at the door to the school newspaper club. The door was opened by a girl with straight black hair and red-framed glasses. “May I help you?”

“Hello,” Toranosuke said. “I was hoping to speak with somebody regarding my latest petition to be readmitted onto the student council.”

The girl opened the door wider, and called out into the room, “Ohya, can you handle this?”

A girl with short black hair groaned from a beanbag in the back of the room and wobbled to her feet. In his short time with the student council, Toranosuke never saw anything regarding beanbags in the budget for the journalism club. The girl walked past him, waving for him to follow her. “So what do you want?”

“I’m hoping to find a platform where I can petition to be readmitted to the student council. I want to help this school—”

“Oh, you’re that guy,” Ohya said. “Didn’t you get kicked out for mishandling funds?”

Toranosuke shifted. That was indeed what he was kicked out for, at least on paper. “Yes,” was his meager response. He didn't have much footing to fight the accusation.

“Wow, sucks to suck,” Ohya said. “Why should the newspaper club help you?”

“For the betterment of the school?” Toranosuke said. “I just want my case to be reviewed again, that’s all.”

“Only way this place will get any sort of ‘betterment’ is if the fucking lap-dogs all got out,” Ohya said. “Sure, you’re sorry for the mishandled funds, but what exactly can the student council do about anything even if it turned out you were all sunshine and rainbows? We all know Niijima doesn’t give a damn about the goings on here.”

“I don’t care about what now?” said a voice from behind them.

Toranosuke could tell at a glance that Ohya’s blood ran cold. Toranosuke himself felt like his heart might’ve skipped a beat, but turned around to face the girl who was at one point his colleague on the student council.

Her red eyes were locked onto the back of Ohya’s head, because the journalist hadn't the nerve to face her head-on. “If you have complaints regarding me or the student council, we can easily arrange for a meeting to discuss the issue.” Her voice was sweet, like honey dripping off a knife.

“Do something about Kamoshida,” Ohya said, disinterested in the veiled aggression.

“Kamoshida?” Makoto asked, a curious tone slipping into her voice. “What’s going on with Kamoshida?”

Ohya finally turned around to face her. “He abuses his teams, that’s what he does. Don’t act like you don’t know.”

Toranosuke was taken somewhat aback. Kamoshida... abuses his teams?

Ohya must’ve seen Toranosuke’s reaction, because she shot him a glare too. “And don’t act like you don’t know either. The council is always awarding volleyball more funds than all the other clubs combined, and even more than that since the track team.”

“Excuse me?” Makoto challenged. “I will not stand here and be insulted like that. If you have a problem with any member of the faculty, take it up with them. It’s not the responsibility of the student council to facilitate your grudge or indulge in your gossip.”

Ohya shrugged, turning away from them both. “Whatever, that’s about what I expected you to say. Bye.”

Toranosuke sheepishly looked between the two of them, then followed immediately behind Ohya. “What’s this about Kamoshida abusing his teams?”

She inspected him for a moment. “You really don’t know, huh?”

Toranosuke shook his head.

“Well, I mean exactly that. He abuses them. Just look at how beaten the volleyball team is. I had evidence, and he destroyed it when he found out. I’ll never get a chance to prove it now that I have him watching his back. He's too guarded.”

Toranosuke went silent for a moment. At one point, he had suggested cutting the volleyball team’s budget to encourage growth in other areas of the team, but found himself snubbed. When he pressed the issue, he was removed from the council under a myriad of allegations. He _had_ suspected Kamoshida playing a role, but abuse on top of that?

“I see,” he said, diplomatically. This was a lot to untangle, at the very least. Makoto did have a point with Ohya having a grudge, the only question was now whether it was justified.

She snorted. “Sounds like I might actually convince you at this rate.”

“I was accused of mismanaging funds after I suggested that his team receive less funding," he explained. "If things are how I think they are, then I have little reason to doubt you.”

“I’m glad to hear it, but... there’s nothing that can be done about it,” she shrugged. “He’s a bastard who uses his volleyball team to spread rumors and trash the reputations of ‘problem students’ like me and you.”

In an instant, she switched from treating him like an enemy to treating him like they were in the same boat. Did the truth of the matter resonate with her that much, or was just inclined to buy into any story that made Kamoshida the villain? There was so much venom in her voice, so much _conviction_.

“You’re letting this get to you,” Toranosuke said. “Is there anything I can do to help your nerves?”

She laughed, her mood changing in a whiplash. “Sneak me something alcoholic. Or, if you’re intent on keeping up the boring goody two-shoes thing, treat me to a hot cup of coffee sometime. You seem like an alright guy, even if I think there’s more to you than just wanting to ‘help the school’.”

“Not really,” Toranosuke admitted. “I have a passion for politics, but if there are other ways I can help in lieu of that, I’d pursue them instead.”

Not happily, of course. Politics wasn’t just a vehicle to good ends for him, it was a passion in of itself. Still... doing good was his _duty_ , leadership was just the road he intended to travel.

She looked towards him, her face stoic but her eyes calculating. “If you really want to know why I don’t believe in somebody with only good intentions, look into Munehisa Iwai.”

“Iwai?” Toranosuke repeated.

“He’s in his first year, like me,” she said. “Supposedly, he’s in with the yakuza. I have reason to believe he’s not, even though he’s up to something.”

“What do you mean?”

“Some money is changing hands somehow,” Ohya said. “He’s spending money he shouldn’t have. His dad runs a run-down airsoft and military surplus shop. He says he’s not involved with anything suspect. I know he’s lying.”

“How do you know all this after less than a month here?” Toranosuke mumbled.

“I’ve only looked into a few scoops,” she said. He didn’t expect her to even hear his mutterings. “Iwai and the new transfer from the rumors, and Kamoshida was on a hunch. Those first two seemed awfully similar, so I looked into it, and it turns out Shujin’s flaunted ‘reformed delinquents’ in the past. None of it’s that complicated.”

“You prefer the dramatic scoops,” Toranosuke surmised. “You’ve actively sought out the worst Shujin has to offer in hopes of exposing it, and were immediately discredited.”

Ohya reached into her pocket and dug something out. “Pff, 'sought out the worst'? Look anywhere and you'll find 'the worst'. I like to call it ‘jump-starting my career’,” she said, handing him a slip of paper with a phone number on it. “Call me if you need anything. I’ll be waiting for that coffee. Bye, Tora.”

And then she was off. He realized that he had never given her his name, which meant she _had_ dug into his situation. Had she been toying with him?

Speaking of names... what had that name been? _Munehisa Iwai_. A boy involved in some sort of shady business, given to him as proof of Ohya’s cynical interpretation of human nature. Toranosuke doubted her worldview, but he supposed he now had his own little investigation to do. He intended to see for himself what was lurking at the underbelly of Shujin.

* * *

**DAYS UNTIL EXPULSION: 14**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope these rushed character introductions aren't too grating, I'm wanting them all to appear early so there's opportunities for them to all have screen-time. Also, don't worry, Shinya won't be such a prick forever.


	6. Ren

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Each chapter I release I'm more and more excited for.

Ren and his teammates surrounded the shadow, keeping their weapons trained on it. The shadow — a green, ghostly horse-thing — was looking around frantically for an escape.

“Hold it,” Ren ordered. “Any sudden moves and we go all-out.”

“Joker,” Lavenza said from the sidelines. She wasn’t participating in the hold-up, instead choosing to manage navigation from inside Margery. “While you have this foe captive, I would like to introduce you to the services the Velvet Room is offering.”

“Everyone, Imago’s about to do something. Weapons stready.”

Lavenza stepped around the hold-up, distributing her single-shot rifles to each member of the team. At the end, she had two guns left, one on each hip.

The green horse-thing looked around, desperate for an escape. Ren re-affirmed the situation by waving his pistol at it, encouraging it to back down again.

“These are special ritual rifles,” Lavenza explained. “With them, we can perform a firing-squad execution and create new personas from the essence of vulnerable shadows. Flip the switch on the side to activate the more advanced features and I’ll demonstrate.”

“You mean like how Joker can hold multiple personas?” Morgana asked.

“Yes, but these personas will be stronger than those captured on-field,” Lavenza explained. “Think of it as breaking shadows down to their raw essence, then creating a persona from the components. You will have little control over the form this persona takes, however, so if there’s a shadow you’d rather capture as-is, please be sure to take that option instead.”

“Let’s try it,” Ren said.

Lavenza stepped into the circle of thieves, joining the hold-up with her two remaining rifles.

“Woah, me willing to talk about this!” the shadow interrupting, pulling itself up and looking around at the thieves in a panic.

“Just shuddup,” Ryuji said.

“On my mark,” Ren said. “Three... two... one... Fire!”

The thieves laid into the shadow with the rifles. It was only six shots, but the shadow collapsed into blue and black energy that writhed on the ground. After a moment, a small, grinning demon-boy with a coat much too large emerged from the pool. “Hiya, the name’s Artful Dodger, a man of the streets! From this point forward, I’ll be your mask!”

The persona collapsed into a stream of energy and merged into Ren’s collection. Artful Dodger did give off an interesting vibe, and his wind skills would come in handy.

“Every persona made through this method will be similar to your original persona in some way, taking on its picaresque qualities,” Lavenza explained. “If I recall correctly, the character Artful Dodger was a friendly, street-smart pickpocket. Similar to Arséne Lupin in many ways, if not quite as impressive.”

Ren smiled. “He’s pretty strong. Stronger than the shadows I’ve been collecting.”

Not as strong as Arséne himself, of course.

“Naturally,” Lavenza said. “And if you want to make a persona with specific specialities through this method, you’ll have to give the shadows corresponding cigarettes to smoke while being executed. It’s the only way of controlling the outcome of the ritual.”

Ren considered the idea. Holding up a shadow, lining up for a firing squad ritual, and sticking a cigarette in the shadow’s mouth. It certainly painted a funny picture in his head.

“That’s so weird,” Ann said. “Would I have to be the one to light them?”

Ryuji huffed. “Where would we even get cigarettes, man?”

“There’s a tobacco store near Leblanc,” Ren said. “But there’s always police nearby, so I’d get in trouble if I tried to buy some.”

“Maybe we can use fake cigarettes, like we use fake guns,” said Morgana.

“Nope,” Lavenza said. “This is a Velvet Room ritual, cognitive trickery won’t suffice. You’ll just have to suck it up and get real cigarettes, despite your delicate teenage lungs and the feeble attempts of lawmakers to protect them.”

“Dude, what if we set off a smoke alarm with the cigarettes?” Ryuji asked. “Wouldn’t that raise the security level?”

“First of all, a medieval castle doesn’t have smoke alarms,” Morgana challenged. “Second of all, if that was going to happen, wouldn’t Carmen’s cigar have set them off by now? Stop asking stupid questions!”

“We’re about a third of the way to the treasure,” Lavenza interrupted from inside Margery. Ren hadn’t noticed her summon the immense navigation persona. “I still say we double back and try scaling the elevator shaft hidden behind the painting.”

“Not a chance,” Ann said. “What if they close up the elevator when we escape?”

“Panther’s right,” Morgana said. “We need an infiltration route that we’re absolutely positive will work as both an entrance and an exit. Besides, you told me that you need to steal more stuff to pay rent, didn’t you?”

“Hey!” Lavenza yelled. “You don’t need to talk about my personal life!”

“You’re having money troubles, Lavenza?” asked Ann.

Lavenza shook her head. “It’s nothing to worry about. I’ll handle it myself. If we’re going to take the long way, then let’s keep going, alright?”

Ann seemed hesitant, but acquiesced.

* * *

They made it three-quarters of the way through the Palace, until it felt like they couldn’t take another step further.

A powerful knight-shadow was bearing down on them, pushing them to extremes. They couldn’t keep fighting against this foe; it was powerful and they had exhausted all their resources. Ren ordered the group to flee, but Lavenza told them to back away and allow her to handle it.

Ren looked at her with surprise, but she shrugged off his concern, and took the black half of her two-colored mask in her hand. Every time she summoned Margery, she had only ripped the gold wing off her mask. He had suspected the other portion of her mask had its own secrets, but seeing it in person was exciting.

She ripped it free, and a figure appeared behind her. It was a man, wrapped in golden shackles and chains, with gilded cages and locks covering nearly every part of his body. To make it worse, he was wrapped in a straight-jacket and like Margery, had only a single eye.

“Houdini,” she said, politely introducing the persona to her foe.

“I am ready, my other self.” The persona rolled his shoulders, and slipped an arm free from his bondage as though it was nothing, and swung his chains at the knight, striking him.

“Houdini is a combat-oriented persona, like the ones you wield,” Lavenza said as Houdini returned to face. “He has direct physical and even projectile capabilities, but all of his magic relates to support effects, no elemental powers or ailments. On the plus side, he has no elemental weaknesses.”

The Berith swung his sword, striking Lavenza. She summoned Houdini again, and a number of his golden chains smashed down on the Berith, knocking it flat. Ren leapt into action beside her, and like clockwork the team assembled around the shadow and pointed the firing squad muskets at it.

“Fire!” Ren ordered.

* * *

With Lavenza picking up slack for the final leg of the infiltration, requiring little help beyond the mundane physical and gun attacks of her allies, they made it to Kamoshida’s throne room and established their route to the Treasure in a single day.

Lavenza was a monster in combat, shredding Shadows like they were mere distractions. Still, the difference between her and the others wasn’t much greater than the difference between Ren when he first awakened Arséne and Ren now that he had the experience of fighting his way through this Palace. He’d catch up to her pretty quickly.

Ren went home for the evening, knowing that it would soon be time to send their warning to Kamoshida. A calling card, a declaration of war on behalf of all those he hurt.

On Monday, everyone agreed to meet on the roof after classes ended. Ren, Ann, and Lavenza all walked together, with Morgana hidden away in Lavenza’s bag. As they waited for Ryuji’s arrival, they chatted idly, until the rusted rooftop entrance squeaked open.

The person who stepped through wasn’t Ryuji, but instead a girl with a head of fluffy brown hair and the most adorable stockings Ren had ever seen somebody flagrantly violate dress-code with. She had this impression of daintiness about her, with fluffy hair and baggy clothes that seemed to swallow her up and make her seem so small and adorable.

“Oh!” she said, her voice high and soft. “Am I interrupting something?”

“We’re just waiting for a friend,” Ann said. She gave the others a look that said, ‘we should take this somewhere else’.

“Yeah, we’ll be out of your fluf— uh, your hair as soon as he’s here,” Ren said.

“Oh, it’s no trouble,” she said. She walked past them and kneeled down by a planter sitting on the roof. “I’m just here to check on the plants.”

She examined them for a moment, and then got back up on her feet. “Oh dear, they’re going to need some extra care today,” she said. “I’ll have to change and come back to re-pot them. Sorry to bother you all.”

“What are you growing?” Lavenza asked, sounding genuinely curious. “Will this small quantity of vegetables really be sufficient to feed you and your family?”

The fluffy haired girl giggled. “No, I’m just growing this for fun. I hope they taste good, though! It’s mostly carrots right now, but I’m also trying daikons.”

“Well, I wish you luck,” Lavenza smiled.

“If you don’t mind my asking,” the girl said, “why are you meeting up here?”

“We were hoping for privacy, but we’ll just move somewhere else if you need the roof,” Ren answered. There wasn’t any need for complicated answers or fabricated stories. “Sorry to bother you.”

The girl thanked them and left. She’d be back up soon, and whether Ryuji showed up before or after she returned was irrelevant, because they’d just have to relocate either way.

“You think she’s cute, don’t you?” Ann asked as soon as the door clicked shut, a grin on her face. “Admit it.”

“Sure,” Ren said, rolling his eyes. “But I’m not going to go after a girl just because she’s cute. I don’t know anything about her. I’m more the type to get to know somebody as a friend first.”

Left unsaid was that he couldn’t risk casual dating, because a casual date could turn into a disaster. As far as Ren was concerned, personal trust came before any romantic considerations. Still, Ann seemed to approve of that answer, nodding along.

“You know that she cultivates and then consumes other organisms recreationally,” Lavenza said, nodding to herself like that was a useful analysis. “Perhaps that could be a basis for a friendship?”

“What? Don’t sound so weird!” Morgana said.

Ren yawned, checking the time on his phone. “I’m pretty sure she has to. It’s some sort of obligation, like a weird-things-to-say quota that Igor assigned her before giving her the boot.”

“Please, Trickster, don’t make me smack you.”

It was then that Ryuji decided to show up. They quickly filled him in on how somebody else would be coming up to the roof, and that they should be moving on to some other location. Lavenza suggested her... office space?

Lavenza apparently had a personal office space.

The five of them went down to the first floor, encountering that fluffy-haired girl, now dressed in a Shujin gym uniform, on her way out of... the nurse’s office.

“You change in the nurse’s office, huh?” Ren asked, only to immediately chide himself as an idiot for saying it out loud.

“What, her too?” asked Ryuji.

“Oh,” she said, suddenly shying back from the group. “You’re the new transfer, aren’t you?”

“Whatever rumors you’ve heard about him aren’t true,” Ann said, a bit too defensively. Ren gently pressed a hand on her shoulder, and she stepped back for him. He appreciated the spirit, even if the execution was lacking.

“No, I’ve never bought into those,” fluffy-head explained. “I just remember when you were first transferring in, my family was notified because...” she trailed off, like she was unsure of what to say. Or unwilling to say it. “The school wanted to deny you accommodations, but I told them that if they denied any student what they claimed they were happy to give me, I wouldn’t feel comfortable here.”

Ren’s eyes went wide. _She_ was the reason the school was willing to accommodate him. Almost by instinct he activated his third eye, and he could see her energy twirling and mingling with his own. It wasn’t enough to form a bond like he had with his friends, but the energies seemed almost drawn to each other. “Thank you... uh...”

“Haru,” she said.

“Haru,” he repeated. “That’s a lovely name.”

She giggled, blushing faintly. She had to know what he meant. “Thank you. ‘Ren’ is nice too. Oh, I have to go now, but feel free to talk to me whenever you like.”

Haru went on up the stairs, past the group.

“I’m sure I missed something there,” Ann said.

“Dude,” Ryuji said. “Did you see how she was looking at you? What was that just then?”

“Telepathy,” Ren answered, pushing the limits of his typical stoicism. “All of the major details were beamed between our heads in a secret telepathic exchange. We, the mole-people, will soon have psychic dominion over this world.”

“You wield no such power, Trickster,” Lavenza said. “Though I noticed how quickly your fates were intertwining. I’m impressed.”

“Oooh, looks like somebody’s got a crush!” Ann teased. “As verified by the supernatural girl, even.” She giggled.

Ren shook his head. “Not listening to it, not encouraging it. Let’s head to Lavenza’s office.”

“It’s not even that great of an office,” Morgana said. “Can’t we go anywhere else? A sushi place?”

Lavenza elbowed her bag. “It’s a perfectly serviceable office, hush!”

They travelled to Yongen-Jaya, where Lavenza led them through a side-entrance to the building hosting the bathhouse, and led them up a flight of stairs to a small hallway. She unlocked the door and welcomed everyone inside. It was a single hallway with three rooms — the offices — and a single-occupancy restroom at the end.

“The first room is where she sleeps on a pile of ratty pillows, the second room is where she stacked a minifridge and a microwave and called it her ‘kitchen’, and the third room is where she locks me when she cleans her uniform because it’s her only outfit and she has to wander around in her underwear when she’s not wearing it,” Morgana said.

Ryuji gave Lavenza a glance. “You uh... You live like this?”

“Don’t believe what he’s saying,” Lavenza said, putting her hands to her hips. “I don’t walk around in my underwear. When he’s locked in there, I have the dignity to launder those and my gym clothes too.”

Ren now knew not to look through her window after school, lest he catch an unfortunate eyeful of Lavenza’s laundry days.

“Riiight,” Ann said. “Let’s take you shopping sometime, alright? It’s on me.”

“More to the matter at hand,” Lavezna said, changing the subject with the dexterity of a drunken bull in a wine cellar, “the calling card.”

“Oh, right,” said Ryuji. “Let me write it! I have so many things that I want to say.”

Ann and Ren shared a look of healthy skepticism; even Morgana took pause.

“Are you sure you’re up to that?” Ann asked.

“C’mon, let me handle it!”

“I’ll help him and make sure this is handled in a reasonable manner,” Lavenza said.

Morgana readjusted himself, swishing his tail. “That’s... not exactly reassuring, you know.”

“Wear gloves,” Ren said, deciding for them. Lavenza seemed to have a good grasp on her language skills. “And don’t breathe on it either. No DNA, no fingerprints. We don’t want any evidence of our involvement. Deliver it in the morning before anybody’s at school.”

“Alright!” Ryuji shouted. “Let’s do this!”

* * *

The next morning, students gathered around the notice board. People whispered and gossiped, taking photos of the red cards covering the wall. Ren stood far back from the notice, close enough to see the crowd and hear the chatter, but too far to see the postings left by Ryuji and Lavenza in the early hours. He kept his eyes down on his phone, where he scrolled through his classmate’s profiles online. He eventually found an image of the card posted by an underclassman, and read it to himself.

  
_Sir Suguru Kamoshida, bastard & pedophile:_

_You have tormented the students of Shujin Academy. You have hidden your immoral acts — acts driven by perverse lust and childish power-tripping. Instead of using your accomplishments to guide and inspire your students, you instead wield your past and prestige as a weapon against them._

_We will take your distorted desires, and you will confess your sins._

_See you after school,_

_The Phantom Thieves of Hearts._

Ryuji and Lavenza definitely outdid themselves.

Kamoshida pushed his way through the crowd, snatching a calling card from the wall. Ren took that as his cue to leave, listening to the sound of Kamoshida yelling at students and throwing accusations. As he made his way up the stairs, Ren couldn’t get the grin off his face.

Classes went by as normal, with him heading down to the nurse’s office to change for gym class again. Partway down the stairs, he found himself joined by Hifumi, who he had figured would be heading to the nurse’s office with him.

“Ugh. Gym,” he complained.

“I try not to think about it too hard,” she said.

He gave her a glance. “Do you know a girl named Haru?”

This was what was called ‘subtlety’, he assured himself.

A small smile grew on Hifumi’s face. “We’ve spoken a few times. She’s nice. I... have suspicions about her.”

“What kinds of suspicions?” Ren asked, digging deeper.

“Nothing important,” she said as they entered the nurse’s office.

“She uses this bathroom to change too.”

“I know,” Hifumi said. “It’s not my place to pry into why.”

Ren nodded. How did he expect himself to hold a conversation like this? They were dancing around their actual questions, both parties clearly wanting to share something, desperate to find somebody else who was like them — someone who was implicitly and near-automatically _safe_ — and yet not knowing if the things they wanted to share aligned. For all Ren knew, she was hoping for a bond with somebody who knew what it was like to hide the scars or bruises of a dark personal life.

“You wouldn’t talk about ‘suspicions’ if you didn’t think you had a place to pry,” Ren said, as Hifumi took the first turn, closing the door shut behind her.

Through the closed door, she continued their conversation. “Prying isn’t always appropriate when you suspect something. You’re prying right now, and it’s not appropriate.”

“Because you’re changing?”

“No, because it might not be something I want to talk about.”

The worst part was that he was certain that they both knew this was the game being played, but neither wanted to throw the dice and see if they really could share a bond. For two alike in their gambling spirits, it was an interesting problem to have. Ren could tell that deep within his soul, Arséne took joy in these exchanges, in their subtle prods for information and careful planning of the next move.

The rest of him was just terrified and desperate, but the mask he used to face the world was thriving on the adrenaline in his veins. “If it does anything for you, I have some suspicions of my own...”

“Oh?”

He tried to breathe in quietly to hide how shaky his voice was. He delivered the pre-prepared line carefully, “I think her reason for changing here is the reverse of mine.”

It was partially a lie. He _knew_ her reason for using this restroom. She told him, albeit indirectly, but she never gave him permission to tell anyone else. But claiming to suspect somebody was very different to incriminating them, so long as he never backed the statement up. Worse comes to worse, he could say he made it up.

“Your reason has a ‘reverse’?” Hifumi asked. “What do you mean by that?”

“If it’s how I think it is, yours is the reverse of mine too,” Ren said in lieu of an answer.

There was a brief silence. She didn’t seem to be the sort to hesitate, not in a time like this. He had either majorly fucked up, or he stopped just short of giving her all the information she needed to make her next move.

“‘Hifumi’ is a good name,” he said, just to drive the point home. He was getting fond of that line.

She stepped out of the room, now dressed in her gym clothes. She gave him a smile, her face slightly reddened. “Thank you,” she said. “Uh, we can talk about this later, alright?”

Ren nodded. “I won’t tell anyone.”

Hifumi parted ways while he stepped into the bathroom to change. He was pretty sure that navigating that conversation took more out of him than taking Kamoshida’s heart would.

Throughout gym, he, Ryuji, Lavenza, and Ann stayed close together, listening to the chatter of the other students. The calling card was the talk of the day, and the students were becoming somewhat obsessed with deciphering its meaning. Some people were laughing it off, a few gave glances in the direction of Ren and Ryuji, but the name ‘Ohya’ was coming up more and more frequently. It was only natural that they’d accuse her. She was on the school newspaper, this sort of scheme was more up her alley than the dumb muscle they took Ren and Ryuji for.

During Ren’s next encounter with Hifumi, they exchanged contact information. As he added her, he took note of the size of his contact list. It was longer now than it ever had been back in his hometown.

Tokyo wasn’t turning out to be so bad.

* * *

The newly named ‘Phantom Thieves of Hearts’ gathered around a table on the Shujin roof.

Ann’s expression was stern and determined, Morgana was confidently standing on the table, Ryuji wore a grin that was almost predatory, and Lavenza was trying to figure out how to pry her hands from a Chinese finger trap.

“Confound this instrument,” she said, pulling the trap tighter. “Who invented this infernal thing? It’s diabolical.”

“Focus!” Morgana interrupted. “This is the moment we’ve been building up to. Once we do this, the Phantom Thieves will be known to the world, and Kamoshida will be reformed!”

“We’re basically going to be revealing the existence of the supernatural, right?” Ren said. “We announced it was going to happen publicly, and now we’re actually going through with it. People will figure out that this isn’t normal.”

“Who cares?” Ryuji said. “Even if they know we used powers to do it, there’s no way anybody will figure out that it’s us.”

“I would like to reiterate that my fingers are ensnared by a children’s toy.”

Ryuji reached over, grabbed her by the hands, and pushed her fingers towards each other. The toy scrunched up, and when he pulled her hands apart it fell into her lap. Lavenza’s face went red and she pushed him away. “Don’t get so handsy with a lady, Ryuji! But uh... thanks, I guess?”

“Anyways,” he said as though that hadn’t just happened, “we gotta take the treasure today, right?”

“We only have until Kamoshida’s calmed down,” Morgana said. “That’s why we had to tell him it would be after school. It has to be definite, but also sudden enough for him to feel unprepared.”

“And now that the treasure’s materialized, we can steal it,” Ren said. “I think we should go in. There’s no point in wasting time.”

* * *

The demonic figure of Kamoshida’s shadow loomed over them. While Ren, Morgana, Ryuji, and Ann laid into him, Lavenza skulked around the edges of the throne room. Blasts of electricity and fire complimented the storm of wind that Zorro and Ren’s new Artful Dodger persona threw around. Ren decided on using wind early in the fight, being the least intensive magic to cast of all his options.

“He’s preparing another spike attack,” Lavenza said from inside her persona Margery. Kamoshida had to know where she was, but couldn’t do anything about it with four people pressuring him at once. “Brace yourselves!”

Margery gave a sadistic chuckle, announcing aloud to the room. “He’ll be open after the attack, my other self. Knock the crown off his head, and take that freakish smile off with it.”

Kamoshida spiked the ball into the ground, shattering the earth and sending everybody back with the shockwave. He sneered at Lavenza. “Ha, you think you can take my crown? I’d like to see you try.”

Lavenza swapped to her second persona, Houdini, and launched herself towards Kamoshida. He turned to swat her out of the sky, but in protecting his crown, he made a fatal mistake.

“Now, Joker!” Lavenza shouted. As the whip-like riding crop smacked her out of the air and sent her downwards, she saw a thin line shoot out of Ren’s wrist and connect with the crown. Ren pulled himself over Kamoshida’s head, swinging past the crown and dislodging it from his head.

Kamoshida sprawled out, reaching for the crown in desperation, but the Phantom Thieves went all-out, beating him down.

They interrogated Kamoshida one last time, then escaped the castle as it crumbled around them.

* * *

**DAYS UNTIL EXPULSION: 13?**

**AWAITING CHANGE OF HEART.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Margery and Houdini were an interesting set of rivals in their days. A pair of magicians with very different focuses, but both masters of their arts. One was a charlatan, and the other a master escape artist.
> 
> Mina "Margery" Crandon claimed to have psychic powers and the ability to communicate with the dead, which she used to gain quite a bit of popularity and prestige as a medium. She never charged for her services, and never once profited from the séances she performed. Several people, including Sir Author Conan Doyle, the author of Sherlock Holmes, believed wholeheartedly in her powers. In this fic, Margery represents Lavenza's Caroline-half.
> 
> For some reason, a rivalry formed between her and Harry Houdini (the famous magician and escape artist, and a friend of Doyle), where Houdini attempted to debunk Margery and prove that her powers were a sham. She was eventually proven to be moving items through trickery. Keep in mind that Houdini did not outright reject the paranormal, but he instead took issue with Margery passing off sleight of hand and prop usage as real magic. Houdini represents Lavenza's Justine-half.
> 
> Needless to say, any person who happened to have the skills of both of them would've made a fine scoundrel.


	7. Hifumi

Hifumi watched the bustle of people, spending their lunch time socializing and eating. She would normally take a seat and think about shogi — it was nearly impossible to gain those precious free moment where she could actually set up her board and practice her moves without being interrupted by some overzealous admirer.

Out of the corner of her eye, she spotted a blonde girl shuffling through a deck of cards near her. She had seen that girl before, shuffling through her deck of cards with beautifully decorated backs and elaborate fronts.

“Excuse me?” Hifumi caught herself saying. She was normally hesitant to reach out to others, but the girl and her cards had intrigued her. “Are those... tarot cards?”

The blonde smiled. “Yes! Are you interested in a reading?”

_A reading?_

Hifumi considered herself open-minded towards the spiritual and supernatural. She couldn’t begin to understand what might exist out in the wider world, and sometimes she could swear she felt an _energy_ in shrines or the church she often visited for peace of mind. Whether or not it was a trick of the mind, she couldn’t be sure, but...

“If you don’t mind, I’d be interested.”

She couldn’t help herself, she was curious.

The blonde girl split her deck, and started shuffling the cards. She seemed very focused through the process, sometimes stopping part way through to do an unusual cut or to flip cards around. “I’m Chihaya Mifune,” the girl introduced herself. “I’ll happily do this first reading for free, but I’ll only be predicting the events of the immediate future. Come tomorrow morning, everything I say should have come to pass. If you’re satisfied with what I tell you, we can do more readings at my standard rates.”

“I would be happy to see it,” Hifumi said.

“Excellent! Let’s find a flat surface to—”

Without speaking a word, Hifumi drew her folding shogi board from her bookbag, and opened it up in her hands for Chihaya to use.

Chihaya smiled. “Perfect, thank you! Let’s see...”

She flipped over the card closest to herself, at the far end of the board. Hifumi noted with some humor that the card was in the board’s promotion-zone, and that by flipping it, Chihaya was ‘promoting’ it like one would to a pawn. “This card is the Star. It promises hope.”

“Hope?”

She nodded, smiling widely. “It’s hard to explain, but this card is very close to you in a way it’s not for others. I’ve only seen this twice before. One boy is the Tower, and I’m Fortune. It’s a very non-standard reading to take from the cards, but I use them more to focus my own talents than to inform.” Her smile turned sheepish. “This might sound dumb, but I’ve been looking for others like this for a while now.”

“Huh,” Hifumi said. She found it hard to believe she could be _that_ special.

She flipped another card, then scrutinized it for a long time. She moved right along to the next card after it, kept flipping cards until they were all turned. At the end, she looked up to Hifumi.

“Before we go any further, can I ask you a question?”

“What is it?”

“I mentioned you have a special reading of the Star. There’s another that I’m looking for. Somebody that’s been here at Shujin. It seems that whoever they are, you’ll be meeting with them after school. Might I... join you?”

Hifumi felt a lump form in her throat. The only person she was planning to meet after school today was Ren. The boy who understood her, who knew her secret. Probably her only real ally in the whole school, at this rate.

“I plan to meet with someone after school,” Hifumi said. Her mouth was dry. “I’d like to keep our conversation private, but I can introduce you when we’re done talking.”

Chihaya beamed. “Thank you! Uh, in any case, you will be meeting with... a Trickster soon, and your fates will become entwined.”

“Entwined fates, huh?” Hifumi said. That seemed like a big promise.

“What I mean is, you’ll reach some sort of understanding, and a bond will develop between you. You’ve just got to trust them.”

Understanding and bonds was much more manageable than ‘entwined fates’, at the very least. “Thank you,” Hifumi said.

“Where do you plan on meeting with this person?” Chihaya asked, shuffling the cards back into her deck. “I’d like to know where, so you can introduce me.”

“The roof, after classes end,” Hifumi said. “He suggested it. But it’s still a private meeting.”

Chihaya nodded. “In that case, can you meet me in the library after school?”

* * *

After the last class of the day, Hifumi made it to the third floor of the classroom building, Chihaya stopped her to tell her that she should bring Ren to the library when she’s done. Hifumi agreed, and the two went their separate ways, with Hifumi heading up to the roof and Chihaya going to the library.

On the roof, she found Ren sitting alone on an old chair. He looked over to her as the door squeaked open. “So, gender, huh?”

She laughed. Somehow, despite the heavy-handedness of his hinting, worry that she managed to misread the situation had wormed its way into her head.

“Hello,” she said, taking another chair. She considered setting up her shogi board and playing while she talked, but she didn’t want to be rude. “Yeah, gender.”

“So you’re trans too?” he asked. It wasn’t really a question.

“I am. I figured it out early, and went on blockers with my father’s support,” she replied. “My mom was a bit harder to convince, but she eventually fell in love with having a daughter.”

Ren nodded, smiling. “That must be nice,” he said, with something of a wistful expression on his face.

 _It was once,_ Hifumi thought. The whole world knew her as a girl thanks to her father’s efforts, and soon she was probably going to end up as somebody’s 

“I didn’t really figure it out until later,” he admitted. “I’m doing the best I can with what I have, but back home, nobody really saw me as a guy. They knew who I was _before_. Coming to Tokyo was something of a fresh start.”

“I’m jealous,” Hifumi found herself saying, and then feeling stupid for saying it. He probably thought she had everything. She had developed in a way that she was very pleased with, thanks to her early start. Ren, by his own admission, didn’t have that privilege.

“Why?” Ren asked.

When she searched for an answer, she hesitated.

“You have a fresh start,” she said, after mulling over the question for a few seconds too long. “I couldn’t move and start my life over even if I wanted to. I’m... well, you recognized me, didn’t you? I’m too famous.”

Realization flickered through his expression. His eyes latched on to her, analyzing her. It wasn’t like the way boys typically looked at her, hungry or awed. He looked at her like he was engaging in a game of shogi with stakes unparalleled. “If the public finds out, news will spread,” he surmised. “You’d never get to hide this about yourself if it got out, so keeping it secret is even more important for you than it is for me.”

She winced. “Yes.”

“And you’re being blackmailed,” he said, softly. The note his voice made wasn’t pitying, it was concerned.

She swallowed, and tried to ignore the emptiness blossoming through her gut. “My mom introduced me to a man...”

Ren sat back, inviting her to continue.

“He manages idols, and I... apparently I have a good shot at a career in that. A lot of famous people were managed by him at some point. He...” she choked up, but pushed through it. Ren needed to hear this. “I don’t know how he found out. Mom... she regrets it. She regrets everything, but there’s nothing she can do. I have to listen to him, sign whatever contracts he puts forward... or he’ll publicize it. Even the shogi league will...”

There were tears streaming down her face, she realized, too late to stop them.

Ren shifted in his seat, and he stared down at his hands. She saw him gripping his pant legs at the knee, pulling at the fabric. “What’s his name?” he asked.

“Junichi Tegoshi,” she replied, mechanically.

“I... I think I can help,” he said, after taking a glance at his phone.

He couldn’t, she knew that much. She met his eyes for a moment, and saw a seething rage boiling off of him. “You can’t,” she said. He wanted to do something, and by all means she should have at least felt like she wasn’t alone in this.

She didn’t feel that way at all.

“I know people who will understand, and they can help you,” he said.

“No, don’t tell anyone,” she hissed. She couldn’t trust anyone. Every person who knew could just turn into another _fucking_ Junichi. She was under his thumb, defying him wasn’t an option, fighting him wasn’t an option, looking unhappy when he was around wasn’t an option. It was just the way things went, wasn’t it? Captured pawns were naturally the tools of the player who captured them.

He sat in silence for a minute. It wasn’t a comfortable silence. “I’m sorry,” he finally said.

She sniffled. All her emotions were coming out here, and she didn’t feel the slightest bit better for it.

“I want to help you.”

She shook her head. There wasn’t any use. Even with her eyes cast down to the floor, she could hear him getting up from his seat, and the chair beside her squeaked as he sat closer to her. For a moment, she wished he would just hug her and tell her that everything would resolve itself and turn out alright.

It would be a lie.

But it would be a lie that she would believe anyway, because it’s something she so badly wished she could believe.

“I know it seems hard, but there’s a way,” Ren promised. “You don’t have to do this alone.”

...and that was a lie she couldn’t believe. She _did_ have to do this alone. She wouldn’t risk bringing anybody else into her fuck-up, not when they’d only make the situation worse. The board only had bad moves, and conceding with dignity was her last option. She had to hope for mercy, not struggle and make everything worse.

“What are you talking about?” she asked, knowing that whatever he offered would just be a vapid fantasy. That was okay, though. She liked fantasy. With a bit of effort, she could give herself to a fantasy and let that protect her heart, if only briefly.

“There are some people,” he said. “They have the power to... take hearts. Make evil people repent.”

“The Phantom Thieves of Hearts,” Hifumi said, remembering the calling card that had made a stir. Everyone knew about it. “You believe in them?”

“Well, if they aren’t real, Kamoshida’s going to expel me,” Ren said, shrugging the admission off like it was nothing. “So I’m going to believe in them and stay hopeful.”

Hifumi lowered her head. The Phantom Thieves... the promises they made seemed almost magical in nature, and yet Kamoshida was nowhere to be seen today.

Her thoughts caught onto one word. _Magical_. Hope, Phantom Thieves, fortune telling, the Star...She was so caught up in talking to Ren that she had forgotten that she was also talking to... well, a Trickster. A person of great spiritual importance, supposedly. “Do you know Chihaya Mifune?” she probed.

Ren shook his head. “Never heard of them.”

“She’s a year below us. She does fortune-telling. I got a reading from her, and she told me that you’re a ‘Trickster’.” His reaction to this was one of surprise, but not confusion. Emboldened, Hifumi pushed the point further. “Does this have anything to do with these Phantom Thieves?”

“I _think_ I know how they steal hearts,” Ren said. “But I haven’t tried doing it myself.”

Hifumi felt hope streak through her like a shooting star. It was a tiny mote of hope, but rushing through her body it burned brightly. “Can’t you steal his heart, then?” she asked, gripping the edges of her skirt.

“Not alone,” he said. “It’s not smart to try it alone.”

“I want to help, then,” Hifumi said. “You’ve already decided this has to be done, haven’t you? Don’t drag other people into this. Let’s do this, just the two of us.”

She might’ve sounded a bit desperate there, but she meant it. This was her chance, a chance to be that Star that Chihaya showed her, promoted in the thick of enemy territory.

Ren looked at her, and she felt the weight of judgement down on her shoulders. “It’s dangerous,” he said. “That’s why it can’t be done alone.”

“I’m willing to risk it.”

“Yeah, but it’ll be dangerous for me, too.”

She wiped a tear from her cheek. It wouldn’t be fair to screw him over for her personal issues. “Is that why you haven’t tried it before?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“Then I’ll protect you.”

She took his silence to mean he knew that she meant it. He trusted her too, or else he wouldn’t have given her even this much consideration.

He took out his phone, and sent somebody a message. She waited while he looked down at the screen.

“Please don’t be telling anybody,” she pleaded.

“I’m not telling anyone,” he said. “But I’ll only do this if I can bring somebody I trust, and you’ll have to tell her if you want to convince her. She knows I’m trans, and she’s accepting. If she can’t come, this isn’t happening. It’ll be too dangerous without her.”

“Why?” Hifumi found herself asking.

“She’s... something of a specialist,” Ren said.

“So... we can do it?” Hifumi asked. She didn’t feel particularly like coming out to a stranger, but...

Ren nodded — smiling softly, in a way that made her feel like he was nothing short of an actual angel — and Hifumi felt her heart thud in her chest, as though their fates entwined right there in that moment, just as Chihaya said.

She found herself silently longing to be just a bit closer to Ren, as though that aura of safety he exuded would grow more intense with proximity. She didn’t move any closer.

It wouldn’t be an easy salvation, she reminded herself, even though she couldn’t find a trace of doubt within herself. It would be dangerous, and she was okay with that. She could give one thousand reasons for her decision: maxims and strategic principles about the folly of being overly-conversative in conflict, or the fact that _doing nothing_ wouldn’t protect her in the slightest...

She could see in his eyes that he knew exactly what she was thinking, and she knew what he was thinking.

It came down to risk and reward. Low-risk and high-reward was the default, while low-reward, high-risk was expunged from the playbook entirely. The only space where true decision-making happened was a tactical spectrum where greater rewards were correlated with greater dangers.

It was high risk, high reward. He was talking like she could _die_ , but in some ways it was the only choice available. Doing nothing would cost her everything and gained her nothing.

The one thousand and first reason for her decision, beyond even strategic considerations, was that she wanted to feel like she had a choice. She wanted to raise the stakes, and even if it made failure a thousand times worse, it meant there might be _something_ to gain. Hope, a piece promoted deep behind enemy lines, a shining star in the night sky to guide her.

She reminded herself again that she _could_ die, but that suited her well enough. She always had something of a gambler’s spirit.

When he broke their shared look — locked eyes and intense... _something_ — with a light blush on his face, she felt suddenly very awkward. She had made it weird, hadn’t she?

“Oh!” she said, desperate to move along, desperately wishing she could will the thudding in her chest to subside. “There’s somebody who asked to meet you. Chihaya, the girl I mentioned earlier with the fortune telling.”

“She wants to meet me?” Ren asked.

Hifumi nodded. “She told me that you were a ‘Trickster’, and I think she wanted to meet you to find out what that means. She’s waiting in the library.”

“Let’s go meet with her, then.”

She thanked whatever god was listening for giving her an easy topic-change ahead of time.

* * *

**DAYS UNTIL EXPULSION: 11?**

**AWAITING CHANGE OF HEART.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gonna be honest here, I come up with Japanese names by going to the Wikipedia pages for Japanese celebrities and combining random first and last names that I see.
> 
> Anyways, I hope I did good with this one! It's more-or-less the start of the shipping stuff.

**Author's Note:**

> I don't have a beta right now, so if anybody's up to volunteer, I'm all ears! Also, if I missed any tags that you would think are useful on this fic, feel free to let me know in the comments.
> 
> Thanks! <3


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